Well, to quote Emperor Palpatine (in Return of the Jedi), “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.”

Now, admittedly, I haven’t specifically foreseen very much, other than trivial things that are foreseen without any conscious thought.  But I did foresee (and did predict*) that I would go to the office today and that I would write a blog post today, which is what seems to be happening.  Hopefully, the Death Star will not be blown up around me.

Anyway, yeah, I’m going in to the office today.  Huzzah.

Okay, with reference to the preceding sentences:  Someone needs to tell all the word processor programs that just because we have a compound word “into” does not mean we cannot use the expression “in to” without it being a mistake!  The two things do not have precisely the same meaning, and the split words are in any case more fundamental than the compound word.

You’d think the editing software was worried that “in” and “to” were like neutrons or something, and that if you separate the compound words from each other they’ll just…decay with a half-life of about ten minutes, like free neutrons do.  Therefore, it’s got to keep them bound, because neutrons in a nucleus are really stable and can last until, I don’t know, the protons decay, if that even happens**.

Perhaps I’m overly impatient, but I get frustrated by the fact that a lot of the time, perhaps most of the time, when Google Docs gives me its grammatical suggestions, I have to choose the option “Suggestion is wrong”.

What bothers me about this‒one of the things‒is that I am pretty sure that I have more grammatical expertise than most people around me, and maybe more than most of the people who use Google Docs.  So, out there in the world where people are using it, mostly they are not correcting it, but are allowing it to correct them without even critically evaluating it.

And so, far from such grammar checkers improving people’s grammatical skill and knowledge, they weaken it.  One does not, simply by driving 26 miles every day, get in shape to run a marathon****.  If anything, one’s physical fitness tends to atrophy, and if one only gets around by motor vehicle, one tends to become far less fit, less healthy, weaker.

Of course, training too much can damage a person’s fitness as well.  Like the Laffer curve, we find our peak benefit somewhere in the middle of the arc.

Well, it looks like my footnotes today are even longer than the main body of this post.  I suspect that they are also somewhat more interesting than the main body of the post, but interestingness (interest?) is in the mind of the beholder, so only you can judge that.

I hope you all have a very good day today and a very good day tomorrow.  You should rest and prepare yourselves, because come Monday, I will be writing another blog post…as always, exclusis improvisis.

*It’s interesting that this word, which has a similar compound structure to “foresee”, is clearly of at least slightly different origin or evolution, linguistically.  Fore see:  to see before, to see ahead of time.  Pre dict:  to speak before, to speak the thing before it happens.  We pre dict but we don’t fore dict.  Likewise, we fore see, but we don’t pre see.  Curious.

**There are various theoretical reasons many physicists think protons should decay eventually, but that the half life is predicted to be something like 10 to the 35th or 10 to the 40th years or some such.  Now that’s a long half life, obviously.  But…there are a loooooot of protons.  There are so many protons (they’re everywhere, believe me, you just can’t seem to get away from them) that even if it will take 10 to the 40th years before half of them would decay, we should still be detecting some of them decaying now and then, if we look***.  But “we” have been looking for quite a while, and we haven’t been able to detect any instances of proton decay whatsoever so far.

***Think of it this way.  If there were a lottery in which to win you had to match 10 numbers, each of which could be between 1 and 100 (nonrepeating), the odds of matching one ticket would be roughly one in 6.28 times 10 to the 19th power, or one in 62,800,000,000,000,000,000 (sixty-two quintillion, 800 quadrillion).  Even so, if you had 10 to the 20th people (a hundred quintillion) playing it every week, you’d expect to have fairly frequent winners despite the long odds.  The chances of winning for one individual are so slight that they might almost as well be waiting to quantum tunnel through their front door, and yet the odds of there being no winner may be only about a coin flip in any given running of the lottery (I could work out the precise odds, but I don’t know that it’s worth the time and effort).  This is not a contradiction.  It’s a good reason to remind people not to be fooled by the fact that they may see on the news that someone often ends up winning the slightly more sane lotteries that we actually run.  Your own odds of winning are so close to zero that you’re almost certainly far more likely to die in a car accident on the way to buy your lottery ticket than you are to win the lottery, but when someone does win, it’s big news.  It’s somewhat analogous to the situation with airline crashes.

***Simply walking into Mordor, on the other hand, might be good for one’s fitness, if only there were not so many…environmental health risks.