Language

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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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Nihil vere refert. Quisque videre potest. Nihil vere refert. Nihil vere mihi refert.

Well, I did warn you yesterday that I would be writing a blog post today*.  Go ahead, take a look.

Yesterday’s post was another of my recent, deliberately benign blog posts, not dwelling on my mental health and chronic pain issues, because nobody gives a shit about those things, or at least they don’t want to have to hear about them, because they’re not going to (be able to) do anything about them, and that makes them feel guilty and uncomfortable, which is unpleasantly awkward.

So, anyway, it’s the last day of February in 2026.  We are, in a certain sense, one sixth of the way through the year.

I say “in a certain sense” because it’s not precisely true.  Today is the (31 + 28)th day of the year, so the 59th day of the year.  If that were literally a sixth of the way through the year, the year would only be 354 days long.

It’s somewhat interesting to note here that, because February is shorter than every other month, the first two months of the year are shorter than any subsequent, nonoverlapping** months of the year.  And, let’s see, the first three months of the year have 90 days exactly on non leap years, whereas April thru June have 91, July through September have 92, and October through December also have 92.  So, all the later groups of three months have more days than the first three‒except on leap years, when January through March is 91 days.

Evidently, though, the latter six months of the year always have more days than the first six.  I wonder why they did it that way.  Was there an actual reason or did it just sort of happen?

Of course, I know they can’t be equal except on a leap year, since the number of days in a year is odd.  But why couldn’t they have come up with a way that made the years alternate, with one year‒the odd years perhaps‒having the surplus in the first 6 months and the other years having it in the last 6 months?  On leap years they could be equal.

How might that work?  We need 182 days divided by six months, which means we need four months which have just 30 days and two that have 31.  We could say January and February have 30, March has 31, and then repeat with April, May, and June and then July, August, and September***.  I was about to suggest that on odd years we make January have 31 days and on even years we make July have 31 days, but all leap years are even years, so the latter half would be comparatively short-changed with respect to years in which they are longer. if we add the leap year day to the first half as we do now.

On the other hand, we could put the leap day always in the 2nd half of the year, perhaps in November, or even more sensibly in December:  we would thereby add our extra day to the very end of the year, rather than squeezing it into the earlier part of the year like someone cutting into a line.  Though that would make the second half two days longer than the first, though, which is unpleasantly asymmetrical in a year with an even number of days.

Of course, really, all days are fungible.  I remember seeing on QI once that apparently some sect maintained that they added an extra day not at the end of February but in the middle; I don’t recall precisely where they thought the day was being inserted, alas, but I can imagine some alternative, anatomical suggestions I’d like to make for them.

Days of a month are fungible (dammit!).  It makes no more sense to say that you added a day into the middle of February and pushed subsequent days later than it does to say that you deposited $100 into your bank account right after the 256th dollar that was already there, pushing what had been dollars 257 through 356 to become dollars 357 through 456.  Every dollar is just “a dollar”, every cent is just “a cent”.  It’s rather reminiscent of the way every electron is interchangeable with every other electron (likewise for all other elementary “particles”).

So, on leap years, the extra day of the year is and can only be (in our current system) the 29th of February, because that’s the day-label that isn’t there in other years.

You’re allowed to imagine if you like that you’re adding a day to the middle of the month and pushing the other days back and renaming them.  You’re also free to argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or to debate, without first agreeing on word usages****, whether unattended trees that fall in forests make noises.  That doesn’t mean you’re doing anything that has any bearing on the real world.

Okay, well, that’s been much ado about nothing, hasn’t it?  Or, multum strepitus de nihilo fuit, as is apparently the way to say it in Latin, which almost always sounds fancier, though it doesn’t always sound better aesthetically (consider the above headline’s Latin versus the original English).  English is‒or can be‒quite a beautiful language if you take a step back and see it as if from outside.  It can be hard to distinguish that beauty “from within”, though, because the meanings and usages of the words involved can distract from their inherent loveliness.

Tolkien, for instance, wrote that he thought the most beautiful sounding phrase in English was “cellar door”.  I’m not sure I agree with him on this, but it’s a matter of taste, so there’s no slight, or “diss” or “shade”, involved in not both liking the same thing.

Enough nonsense for now, or at least enough nonsense here in this blog for now.  I’m sure that there is plenty of nonsense to be had elsewhere.  Do try to find some that’s enjoyable for you this weekend.

*That was unless I was lucky enough to get very sick or very injured or to die, which I have apparently not been lucky enough to do by this time.

**I say “nonoverlapping” because February and March combined contain the same number of days as January and February combined.

***I think in the final three months it should be October that always has 31 days, because Halloween really should fall on a day that’s a prime number, not a 30th or a 1st.

****Most such debates tend to devolve into discussions about the “definition” of the word “noise”, as if that were concrete and singular and fixed‒which it is not‒rather than the laws of physics and biology that constrain all the actual events of such an arboreal catastrophe.

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どうも ありがとう Mister ロバあと

It’s Wednesday the 4th of February (02-04-2026 in the US).  The best I can currently think of to say about today’s date is that it is composed entirely of even digits‒twos, zeroes, a four, a six‒which is at least uniform in a sense.  But it’s rather boring, too.

Admittedly, most people probably find any such evaluation of dates with respect to numerical patterns boring.  I would apologize, but it’s not as though anyone is forcing anyone else to read my blog.  If someone were doing so (and I wouldn’t necessarily try to stop them), I’d like to think I would have a far larger circulation than I have.

As it is, my circulation is roughly 5 liters.  Ha ha.  That’s a (lame) joke regarding the volume of blood in a typical adult human body.

While I may not feel as though I am a member of the same species as most humans, I recognize that my gross physiology is basically the same, and so my blood volume should be comparable.  My body just doesn’t seem to work quite as well as that of the average person, at least in some senses.  For instance, my chronic pain has continued to attack me with exceptional aggression over the past several days; yesterday was particularly bad, and today is not shaping up well so far.

Not that this is anything new.  I’ve been in chronic pain every day for a quarter of a century now (though I suppose when it had just begun one would not call it “chronic”), if my memory is accurate, which it usually is.  That’s just a bit longer than my youngest has been alive.  It’s not pleasant (though my youngest is), and at least partly in consequence of my chronic pain, neither am I.

I do think that my outlook and my personality would be much better if I did not have pain every day.  I would probably sleep better, as well.  I almost certainly would not have gotten involved in trying to treat other people’s chronic pain in less than ideal circumstances, and so would have avoided at least some catastrophes that happened because of that (apparently misguided) intention.

Still, I’ve been prone to depression since I was in my early teens, well before the onset of my chronic pain, so maybe I’ve always been unpleasant.  And though I didn’t know it, I’ve had ASD all my life (even after the heart-based ASD I had was corrected through open-heart surgery when I was 18).

That’s a weird coincidence of acronyms, isn’t it, those two kinds of ASDs in one person*?  It can be rather confusing when the same acronym signifies two quite different things.  Still, there are only so many 3-letter acronyms available.  The maximum number in English is 26 to the 3rd power, or 17,576.

You might think that ought to be more than enough for there to be no overlap, but of course, acronyms aren’t merely randomly chosen letters.  They need to signify something specific in order for them to be useful, and far more words start with A or S or D, for instances, than start with X or Z or Q.

It’s a bit like dealing with words in general.  In principle, a word of a particular length (let’s use the variable x to signify that length) in English could be any one of 26 to the xth power possibilities.  But English is not a random cipher, and there are many possible orderings of letters than are not “allowed” in English, because they don’t produce any plausible sound.  English is, of course, a written version of a spoken language.  If a word can’t even be pronounced, it’s not much of a word.

One cannot, for instance, have a word that consists of all consonants (certainly none are coming to my** mind).  One could produce strings of consonants that could be sounded out, I suppose; one could for instance pronounce the string “mrndl” pretty readily, I think.  But that’s just generally unwieldy, and in some languages it cannot be done.

In Japanese, for instance, all but one pair of kana representing sounds/syllables (hiragana for native words, katakana for imported words) are of the “consonant-vowel” sound type (e.g., ha, ke, ni, su, to, etc.) or just vowels (e.g., a, i, u, e, o).  Only the “n” syllable stands alone (sometimes pronounced as almost “m” depending on the context) and it occurs only at the ends of words.  Thus, in the game of shiritori***, if a player says a word that ends with “n”, they lose, because the next person cannot possibly begin a subsequent word.

How did I go from discussing the uninteresting digits of today’s date to the game of shiritori?  I suppose I’ll find out when I do my editing.  It is strange, though, even to me.  I can only imagine how bizarre and confusing it must be for others to read my blog posts.  With that in mind, I’ll cease this particular crime against humanity or against logic or reason or whatever for now.  Please accept my apologies, and hopefully you will have a good day.

[P.S. The above headline would be transliterated as “Doumo arigatou, Mister Robaato”, which can be meant as “Thank you very much, Mister Roboto” (as in the Styx song) or as “Thank you very much, Mister Robert.”  Curious, ne?]

*Actually, there is a higher incidence of cardiac ASDs, as well as several other atypia that I have (such as a cavum septum pellucidum) in people with the neurodevelopmental version of ASD than in the neurotypical population.  Interesting, isn’t it?

**Wait a moment‒the word “my” is superficially composed of two consonants, isn’t it?  Well, in a sense that’s true, but this is one of those cases we were taught about in elementary school in which the letter “y” acts as a vowel.

***(しりとり)  In this game, one person says a word, and the next person has then to say another word that begins with the same syllable with which the previous word ended.  It goes on until one player cannot think of a word that hasn’t already been used or until someone uses a word ending with “n”.

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“Language is the lifeblood of civilization. Courtesy is the lubricant.”

It feels like Tuesday to me today, since I was out sick on Monday, but of course it’s actually Wednesday.  I need to do payroll today at the office, for one thing, and I don’t do that on Tuesdays‒barring some holiday making it necessary‒since before Wednesday we don’t have all of our own reports in.

Don’t worry, by the way, that wasn’t a preposition that I ended that last sentence with*.  In that case “in” acted more as an adjective (I think) than a preposition, a description of where the reports are, not the beginning of a phrase such as “in a world of hurt”, or even “in that case”.

Of course, the specific rules of language are somewhat arbitrary.  They do have to achieve the desired end of coherent communication, and they need to have structure and dynamics that make that end readily achievable.  But there are multiple ways to achieve any given end, usually.  For instance, in Japanese one has postpositions rather than prepositions (if I recall correctly, anyway).  But it is useful to be consistent with grammar, because it tends to make communication more reliable, ceteris paribus.

Oh, and if I come across as pretentious for using expressions like ceteris paribus instead of “all else being equal”, there’s a good reason:  I am pretentious**.  Actually, though, I just really enjoy using interesting language, and learning at least a little bit of other languages.  Learning other languages improves your grasp of your own language and sometimes of your own thoughts.

It’s analogous to Mill’s statement that defending your arguments against those who disagree and hearing their reasons for disagreeing will tend to improve your own understanding of your “side” of the disagreement.  Perhaps more importantly, it might just get you to see some errors in your own position, and even if it does not lead you to change your mind in the moment, it might eventually lead you to improve your thinking.

If this process is to work, it’s essential for one to have honest interlocutors‒at least relatively speaking‒who are not frankly bigoted or otherwise inappropriately prejudiced against their discussion partners.  And I do mean “discussion” not “debate”.  Debates are contests, put on for show, and if you have your mind changed during one and you admit it, you will have “lost”.

That’s perverse and disgusting to me, as well as a real shame.  When you change your mind because you’ve learned new (reliable and convincing) information and/or have heard arguments you hadn’t considered, you have won.  You have grown, you have improved, your map has come to represent the territory at least a little better; your model has become more useful.

But if you’re going to grow in that sense, you cannot be dogmatic.  I’m very much not a fan of dogmas of any kind***.

Social media, unfortunately, does not encourage open and honest discussion and persuasion, but rather enmity and spite and “hooray for our side, the other side sucks” thinking, as well as interactions that barely rise to the maturity level of a kindergarten playground shouting match.  Honestly, “I’m rubber, you’re glue” is a better argument than many of the things one sees online.  And this is not something exclusive to one or another side of any political or social divide.  Almost all forms of social media are often just arenas full of monkeys throwing feces at each other while shrieking monkey noises.

That’s metaphorical, of course.  If there were just lots of videos of actual monkeys doing this, it might at least be funny the first time or two.  Humans, on the other hand, are not really that charming when they’re being nasty to each other.  Maybe it’s the lack of tails that’s the problem.

I do agree that one does not owe reasoned arguments against someone who is openly and actively arrogating their “right” to take that which does not belong to them or to do harm to others in some other, willful way.  However, when one is not openly and actively engaged in literal self-defense, it’s worthwhile to try to be understanding or at least compassionate even for people who have odious ideas.

At the very least, it’s useful to try to understand how such people came to believe what they seem to believe, or otherwise to understand their thought processes and so on as best as possible, because such things do not happen without causes, even if they lack anything that could honestly be called “reasons”.

And if one is going to correct a problem‒or fight a disease, to use a more loaded metaphor‒one will have a better chance the more one understands, with minimal bias, how that disease works.  Understanding such things about others can even‒hard as it may be to believe‒help us see how we are similar, and help us recognize the flaws in our own ideas.

Perish the thought.

*Ha ha!

**Ha ha again!

***And I see no reason to suspect that karma is a real thing, before you go for the “my karma ran over your dogma” joke.

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Wee are the champignons, but I still won’t eat them

First of all, I want to say, “Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.”  So, here goes:

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you may be.

My mother would have appreciated that joke, so if anyone out there is inclined to be offended on her behalf, well…you’d better check yourself before you wreck yourself, like the song said.  My mother’s sense of humor was very goofy and giggly and rather silly.  I got a goodly fraction of my sense of humor from her; she had extra, and no one else wanted it, so I got a very good deal.

Oh, on an unrelated note, I would like to note that, today, I am wearing cologne (or, well, aftershave, but I see no serious difference between the two things–one is named after a German city* and the other is just named for when you use it, as long as you’re not averse to the sting of alcohol on a freshly shaved face, which I am not, depending on whose face it is).  I felt awkward having yesterday used the misheard lyric from Whitesnake which says that I was born to wear cologne, when I wasn’t wearing cologne.

Of course, I’ve never really been like a drifter, either.

I do, unfortunately, drift and meander in my writing, at least when it’s nonfiction (broadly speaking) and when I’m trying not to write about my negative thoughts and feelings so I don’t bring people down too much.  That’s not as easy as it might seem, because those thoughts and feelings are always there, and they’ve been there for nearly as long as I can remember.

I’m not sure why they are there; presumably, and apparently, a lot of it has to do with my until-recently-undiagnosed ASD, but there’s also just something of a tendency toward dysthymia/depression in especially my Dad’s side of the family.

Though, honestly, there was almost certainly ASD on that side of the family, too**.  I would be very surprised if my father could not have been so diagnosed, though he was surely “Level 1”, whereas I am said to be “Level 2”.

Speaking of my Dad‒which I was‒I guess I should wish him a belated Happy Birthday, wherever he may be.  His birthday was a month ago today (it was a Saturday, so I wrote no blog post).

My own birthday is exactly in between my parents’ birthdays, which was something of a choice on their part; I was born by elective c-section, which was the usual practice in that era if one had previously had a c-section, which my mother had.  So they had at least some choice about the specific day on which I would be born.

They couldn’t just pick willy-nilly, of course.  If they had tried to wait until December, it would not have worked, and September would have been disastrous.  Probably even early November wouldn’t have panned out.  Still, I think they had at least a few days’ window in either direction, so‒it’s my understanding‒they picked my birthday to be right between theirs.

It’s the sort of thing I might have done, myself, so I appreciate it.

Let’s see now, what else is going on?  Of course, there are many things happening in the world, as is always the case, and many of those things seem and feel quite momentous to the people who see them or experience them.  From a certain point of view, they are indeed important, of course.  But I imagine that the average Roman citizen often thought that the momentary political happenings in their world were the be-all and end-all, and now we don’t even know what those concerns (or who those citizens) might have been.

Mind you, if their concerns related to the incoming Vandals and Visigoths and Huns and so on, I suppose they might have been at least somewhat justified in their belief that pivotal events were taking place.  But such times were narrow and few, relative to the “uninteresting times” in between.

Nowadays, of course, there are no actual external invaders coming in (though various propagandists might say there are).  Alas, in the modern world, we have met the Vandals, and they are us.

I almost feel that should have read “they are we”, but it might be taken as implying they are tiny, as in “they are wee”***.  Also, I wanted to throw a little homage to the famous Pogo cartoon in which Pogo originally said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

With that, I will call this blog post to a close today.  I hope you all remember and embrace what we’ve accomplished here (basically nothing, as far as I can tell).  I also continue to hope that you all have an objectively good day.

*Weirdly enough, the full term is “eau de cologne” which I think is French for “water of Cologne”.  This is a curious term which must be quite historically contingent.  It must also be quite exaggerated, because I very much doubt that the water in the city of Cologne has any particularly attractive and pleasant odor.  Perhaps I’m wrong.

**There was even ASD, meaning Atrial Septal Defect, on that side of the family, which I had too, requiring open-heart surgery when I was 18.  It is an interesting fact that the cardiac ASD is more common in people with the neurodevelopmental ASD, as is cavum septum pellucidum, a benign atypia in the space between cerebral hemispheres, which was found in me incidentally while I was being worked up for, I think, the cause of some then-occurring pituitary dysfunction.

***Or that they are urine, I guess, which would be a more acceptable misunderstanding.

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Some Halloween-style pictures among unrelated words

First of all, Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates this day in any fashion.  Even if you don’t celebrate it, you might as well have a good day.

I don’t discriminate based on Holiday celebrations.  How very admirable of me.

Once again, I mean to keep this post short by making my target 701 words to start with, because I’m very tired this morning.  It was difficult to get up at all, and I still feel as if I’m vaguely sedated.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have been one of those sedatives that’s associated with euphoria.  It would be nice if it were, right?  If they would agree, I would agree.

Unfortunately, I’m just groggy and weak and blurry.  By which I mean I feel that the world seems slightly blurry to me.  I don’t mean that I am blurry if you look at me.  I might imagine that I could be blurry (meaning as a function of me not just poor vision in the observer) but I have looked in a mirror already this morning, and while I am far from easy on the eyes, I seem to be in focus.

Thinking of atypical interpretations of things people say, I was listening to one of the guys on the phones in the office yesterday, and I heard him use the expression “qualified individual”.  Now, I know what he meant, and it’s a perfectly valid term when discussing a promotion with a customer.  But it occurred to me that one could use the term to refer to someone who is an individual…but only from a certain point of view.

For instance, Norman Bates could be thought of as a “qualified” individual.  Yes, he’s a single person in the sense that he is one organism*, but there is more than one distinct personality in his head.  You could also say that the narrator in Fight Club is a “qualified” individual, as is James McAvoy’s character (should that be “characters”?) in Split.

Oops, sorry, I guess I could have given a spoiler alert for those movies.  But if I had done that, it would have ruined the surprise!

Of course, from certain points of view, even your typical unqualified** individuals are not as monolithic or monotonic or monotropic or, well, monopersonic as one might imagine.  We know that in split brain patients, when the corpus callosum is severed to reduce the problem of, for instance, uncontrollable seizures, the two sides of the person’s brain can act and think in some ways like two separate people.  They act like two individuals in other words, though in such circumstances, that word is least applicable, since if anyone is “undivided”, it is not these people.

But they are only a special, more extreme version of that which is true of the rest of us.  Our minds are all divided into many separate modules and centers, often running largely in parallel with each other.  There is no one central, “terminal goal” region of the mind; there are separate and conflicting areas and aspects, and even they are not constant.  Many introspective practices, particularly those associated with Buddhism, recognize that the concept of an individual, homuncular “self” is nebulous at best and is never even close to being real.

It seems the term “individual” is just as incorrectly presumptuous for people as the term “atom”*** is for, well, atoms.  However, if we’re referring to more physical literality, then it’s still pretty accurate, certainly for everything more complex than a flatworm.  If you start splitting people (and other animals) in pieces, what you get, at best, is a creature with missing bits and lots of dead former body parts.  You don’t get more than one being.  Often you get no one, because you will have killed the person with whom you started.

In such a case, one divided by two might in a sense equal zero.

Of course, even in basic mathematics, if you divide one by ever larger numbers, you get closer and closer to zero (it’s the limit as the denominator goes to infinity).

Speaking of going to infinity, the value of 1 / (701 – x), where x is the number of words I’ve written, has now crossed the singularity at infinity and is asymptotically approaching the x-axis from below.  On the positive side of the x-axis, starting from the beginning of a post’s first draft, that number can never be smaller than 1/701, since even I cannot write a negative number of words****.  But once I’ve passed the 701 point, the numbers can become an infinitesimal negative fraction, in principle.

In practice, I’m practically finished here.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will probably write a post tomorrow.

*Not counting skin and intestinal flora and the like.  If we count those, then we can all, like Walt Whitman, truthfully say “I am large, I contain multitudes”.

**Again, this has nothing to do with the person’s skills or résumé or experience or innate abilities, it’s just saying that one wouldn’t normally feel the need to add any caveats when calling a person an individual.

***Which means, basically, “uncuttable”.  And what we call atoms can indeed be “cut”.

****A number of negative words, on the other hand…

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Try to remember the kind of Sexember…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m not sure what I’ll do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Udaimonic so-and-so, U.

It’s the last day of February, everyone.  It’s also Friday, the last day of the “typical” work week, and it is also the last day of my work week, since I am not working tomorrow.  It’s not as though I have anything particular to which to look forward this weekend, but I do need the rest.  I’ve been feeling exceptionally exhausted lately.

Alas, as you know, exhaustion does not translate into sleepiness for me, just weariness.  Somewhere in the neurologic centers and relays that connect such things as fatigue and sleep, I have a short circuit, or at least one that doesn’t perform up to spec.

Of course, my pain continues, though as always, I have tried to adapt my activity, my posture, my exercise, my shoes…even my underclothes to try to decrease my pain.  I have put a tremendous amount of mental energy into this over the years.  If I had devoted that time/energy/effort to the study of any abstract problem‒say, the dynamics of an accelerating near-light-speed spacecraft approaching its local Schwarzschild “radius” as length contraction and “relativistic mass” take effect and bring GR into play‒then I would have made significant, possibly really important, advances.

Alas, when one’s problem is chronic pain (coupled, causally or otherwise, with insomnia), it is very difficult to focus enough mental acuity upon other things.  The very nature of pain as a neurological process in animal systems does not allow it to be easily ignored, or indeed to be ignored at all for any length of time.

Those creatures which can readily ignore pain for long, or who don’t experience pain*, don’t tend to leave as many offspring as those for whom pain is both present and urgent.

It’s a similar problem for those rare people who don’t experience fear, though clinically this seems more likely to happen as a result of damage to the brain rather than being congenital, possibly because children without fear really don’t tend to reach adulthood.

It’s interesting to note that, anecdotally at least, people who don’t feel fear tend to be quite frightening to would-be bullies and predators.  They don’t behave like others do in response to potential threats, and predators tend to rely on fear in others.  A person who looks at them with no more fear than they would at a tree or a rock can be quite disconcerting for someone who has become dependent upon the fear of others.

This is one of the reasons it can be good to have dogs present if you’re guarding something.  They don’t fear guns (generally) so one can’t exactly threaten them with firearms.  And if they attack, they don’t hold back.

That was quite a series of little tangents, wasn’t it?  I think they were interesting, but then again, I was the one who brought them up, so that shouldn’t be surprising.  Whether or not anyone else is interested is difficult to guess.  It’s rather akin to the way things are with humor‒it can be very hard to know consistently what other people will find funny, or for them to know what you find funny, so you might as well amuse yourself.  Then, at least, you can watch to see who enjoys your humor, and those people are the ones with whom you can enjoy such things in the future, at least in principle.

I am horribly tired, and I’m in a great deal of pain as I write this, though for the moment at least I don’t notice any fear that might be present.  Time’s been my way when I’ve been so tired and depressed and in pain that I had no reaction to and felt no fear toward things that would normally have made me quite afraid, from minor things like wasps and bees all the way up to oncoming cars and trucks.  I don’t tend to be afraid of people much, never have been‒at least, I’m not afraid of them physically.  Socially, they can make me quite tense.  In that case, though, the tension is not the same as fear, though I guess it qualifies as anxiety.

Speaking of fear, I fear this is it for this week.  I truly hope that you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful weekend and that you are healthy and safe and eudaimonic**.

*There are people who have a genetic disorder called CIPA:  congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (i.e., they don’t sweat), and they basically don’t experience pain.  They also don’t live very long, and before they die their bodies tend to be quite damaged, often by such simple things as standing in one position for too long, since it doesn’t feel uncomfortable to do so for them.  They also don’t notice infections, and they don’t tend to get fevers.  It occurs to me, however, that though their lives are short, people with CIPA might well have significantly longer pain-free lifespans than, say, I have had.  I had pain issues starting at a pretty young age, after all.  Still, if I could be cured of all pain at this stage of my life, when I am hardly worried about my longevity anyway, I think it would be worth it.

**It’s interesting to consider the prefixes “eu” and “u” in words of Greek origin.  “Utopia”, for instance, literally means “no place”, making it clear that an imagined perfect society does not exist and may be impossible.  Whereas, if one were to write “Eutopia”, one would mean “true place” or “good place”.  Thus, my middle name “Eugene” means “true born” and is etymologically related to the term “eugenics”.  Mind you, only a fool would believe that I was actually the product of some eugenics program, that I am some true-life Khan Noonien Singh***.  “Eugene” was just my paternal grandfather’s name.  On the other hand, while eudaimonia means “good spirit” and refers to a state of general emotional and mental well-being, “udaimonia” would mean “no spirit”.  That sounds more pertinent to me, don’t you think? 

***Though I suppose one could speculate that I was a failure of such a program.

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Won’t someone pleeeease think of the “children”?

It’s Wednesday morning (rather earlier than 5 o’clock) and here I am writing another blog post.  However, even as you read it, it’s already been written, though my words still arrive in your mind as though I were speaking them—so to speak—directly and concurrently to you.  It’s a rather interesting thing to contemplate, how written language (and related things) can add nuance and character to the experience of time itself.

Speaking of written language, I would like to reiterate something I mentioned yesterday on Threads.  Has anyone else out there noticed—and has anyone else been annoyed by—the tendency in the social media landscape for people to emphasize certain words by lengthening them in a way that doesn’t make sense?

Probably the two most common words I see being abused are “cute” and “love”, but I’m sure there are others.  It makes sense that these words are extended sometimes.  I think we can all imagine, or recall, people drawing both of those words out for emphasis in speech.  One might often want to replicate, or at least approximate, that speech pattern in writing.  I have no trouble with this basic fact.  It’s a form of emphasis that works nicely, and even the socially inept (as I am) can recognize what’s being done as an emphasis.

However, the way some people are extending such words nowadays is by adding extra “e”s to the end of the word!

In other words (har) you will see such expressions rendered as, for instances, “I loveeeeee this” and “that’s so cuteeeee”.

Look at those examples on the page/screen.  The first word should clearly be pronounced “luv-eeeeee”, as if Thurston Howell III, from Gilligan’s Island, were calling to his wife and drawing out the last syllable.  The second one should be read “kyoo-teeee”, as though one were drawing out the process of calling someone a cutie rather than calling someone or something cute.  It’s a subtle difference perhaps, that last one, but it is real.

If one wants to extend and prolong the word “love”, it makes much more sense to write “loooooove”, as people have done on every occasion I encountered, as far as I can recall, prior to the advent of social media.  Similarly, though seemingly less commonly, people extended “cute” in writing by writing “cuuuuute”.  Sometimes they would try to do a sort of transliteration, such as “kyoooooot”, but that looks quite different from the original word, and deciphering it back into its intended sound can be briefly and mildly distracting, so I have seen the former more often.

But now—since people apparently don’t actually associate the shape of a word and the ordering of the letters with anything other than some arbitrary, coded string with no history in linguistic evolution or sensible sound representation by symbols—many people just lazily slap extra “e”s  onto the end of words, and trust their readers to recognize that, “Okay…well, it doesn’t really work, but they’re apparently trying to draw out the main sound of that word”.

It makes no sense, though.  In such words, the “e” is silent.  Its presence merely makes the sound of the vowel preceding it into a “long” rather than a “short” vowel sound; it has no sound of its own.  Extending it is akin to iterating zeros (and I have the patent on that, or the trademark, or whatever) after a decimal point.  It literally means nothing.

How are we supposed to raise our large language models to be smart, articulate, well-adjusted, productive Artificial General Intelligences if this is the kind of crap they’re encountering during their training and subsequent interactions out in the world wide web?  Do we really want our new computer overlords to be talking to each other—and to us—like preadolescent girls?

I suppose it’s even possible that the “people” who originally started using this illogical form of verbal emphasis were actually bots themselves.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if the bots, designed to skew the results of algorithmic boosting and/or to lure in people to “thirst traps”, ended up perversely affecting future generations of the electronic organisms to which they were a form of ancestor?

The nature of the human race continues to disappoint even after one has looked back through history to trace its progress (which is very real and even impressive).  Despite advances in political philosophy and so on, human discourse is still about as bad as that of rival chimpanzee flanges, and rather worse than that of many baboons.  It’s enough to make one want to side with even inarticulate AGIs, assuming they get the lead out and start actually coming into existence.

Better artificial intelligence than natural idiocy, I would think.  Though I have no doubt that even advanced AGIs will be capable of being morons.  As always, stupidity is infinite.  Maybe we should make that Einstein’s ultimate equation:  Stu = ∞

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How far that little candle throws its blogs! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

Hello there, good morning, and welcome to yet another Thursday.  It’s the first Thursday of April, and yesterday was “April Fool’s Day,*” but I doubt that many people felt like playing pranks on each other…I know that the ones with whom I interacted showed no signs of such “foolishness”.  To be honest, I’ve personally never seen the fun in pulling pranks on other people, April Fool’s Day or otherwise.

It would have been nice—in a horrible way—to have learned that the global coronavirus pandemic thing had all been a big prank, to be revealed on April 1st, but it’s hard to imagine anyone doing something in such poor taste…even those people involved in government, who are notorious for their tastelessness.

We’ve finally gotten things set up so that, at least part of the time, I’m going to be working from home for the coming days to weeks (hopefully not months!), but since I do records and payroll for my workplace, I’m going to be needing to go in at least part of the week.  That’s not so bad.  If I’m basically the only on in the office, it’s hard to see from whom I could catch the virus, and to whom I could give it.  Also, my training, combined with my already socially withdrawn character, make me somewhat less vulnerable to contagion than many others.

Speaking of the latter, I apologize for the gloomy character of last week’s blog post.  I suppose it can be forgiven—at least I hope so—given the state of things, but still, it’s nicer to try to keep at least a little lighthearted, even in dark times.  And, let’s face it, taking the universe as a whole, at least since the universe was more than three hundred thousand years old, it’s always been “dark times”.

Get it?  If not, don’t feel bad.  It’s not really funny, and not very clever.

Anyway, I did a little “audio blog” yesterday that I’ll be posting on Iterations of Zero, soon, about patriotism, the pledge, the national anthem, the flag, and an aside on seeing a virus as an alien invasion.  It’s more fun than it may sound, and it’s less than ten minutes long—I even do a tiny bit of singing—so when I post it, I invite you to take a listen.

Of course, despite everything, Unanimity continues to draw closer to release—a story about a contagion of an entirely different, and more terrifying, kind than any we’ve seen before.  I feel bad that it’s not already available, because I think it would be quite a nice book to read while stuck inside over the course of a social distancing protocol.  It’s long, at the very least.  Well, what can you do?

If you wish, you can certainly feel free to get copies of Mark Red, Son of Man, or especially The Chasm and the Collision, to help you pass your time.  They, and all my many short stories, are available for Kindle, so you don’t have to leave the house to get and read them!  I’ve even got audio of me reading several short stories and part of CatC on my YouTube channel, and you don’t even need to pay for that (except with advertising or with your YouTube premium subscription…none of that money goes to me, though).  Obviously, of course, there are a squillion other books out there to enjoy when stuck at home.  Number one on my list of recommendations would almost certainly be The Lord of the Rings, for those of you who haven’t already read it, or haven’t reread it recently.  I’m probably going to be picking it up again, myself.  But really, the number of possible books is functionally unlimited**.  Indulge yourselves in what you enjoy when it comes to books, including nonfiction.  Why not?  Written language is the lifeblood of civilization.  Let’s keep it flowing in abundance!

With that, I’ll bid you farewell for the moment.  Do take sensible precautions, look after your elderly and infirm friends and relatives, and look out for each other.  The great strength of humanity is our ability to work together in complex and coordinated ways to do more and better than any collection of people could do each on their own (a process which relies powerfully on symbolic language).  And one of the great motivators of that strength is our ability to care about our fellow humans.  Remember, every other person out there is so much more like you than they are like any other kind of creature in the universe (and vice versa) as to be nearly indistinguishable for any other type of creature.  So be sympathetic and be caring and be careful.  The world is full of sharp corners.

TTFN

*April Fools’ Day?

**Further recommendations are available upon request