life

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Shall you this fond pageant see?

It’s Monday again.  It is as I write this, anyway.  Maybe it’s not Monday when you’re reading it.  Who knows, maybe you’re living at some point in the relatively far future in which the human race‒or their computer overlords‒has abolished Mondays because they are too unpleasant.

Of course, then you’d just move the problem to the next day, leading it to be the unpleasant beginning of the week, because it’s not what day it is that presents a problem, it is the function of the day, if you will.  In this case, that means the day serving as the beginning of the “work week”.  Still, even future humans might be foolish enough not to recognize that fact, based on my experience with past and present humans.

Actually, based on the nature of current “AI” and how it functions and is grown, I wouldn’t be much more surprised if they made the same mistake.  Careful, logical reasoning is not necessarily in the nature of so-called deep neural networks and the like.  Indeed, the ability to reason abstractly may have arisen in humans precisely because they needed to be able to convince their tribemates of various things, and also to avoid being taken in by a tribemate trying to convince them of something that was not in their best interests.  As with so many attributes of life, even the ability to reason was probably born of a kind of arms race.

Heavy sigh.  Ah, well, great things can arise even from inauspicious beginnings.

I started my post a little late this morning because I’ve been moving slowly, both mentally and physically.  I’m kind of wiped out, and I have been all weekend; I could hardly get anything done.  I guess this is one of those times when I ought to be grateful that there’s no one to nag me (or cajole me, or encourage me, or what have you).  Honestly though, having such a person around is underrated, I think.

I had a stretch starting about two weeks ago or so in which my back and joint pain seemed to have calmed down a lot, and mere moving didn’t even hurt.  As a consequence, my mood and optimism improved a bit, and I even started to feel like I might be able to like myself to some degree.

Ha ha ha!  Lord, what a fool this mortal be.

Starting when I got sick, which I think I have mentioned more than once, I got a re-flare of my pain, and it has come back with a vengeance.  During the course of the latter part of this last work week, I took a fair amount of extra pain medicine of various (legal) types (I don’t even know how one locates “street fentanyl” or the like, let alone how one could feel confident that it is what it claims to be) and maybe that’s what’s taking the wind out of my sails.  Certainly my kidneys and stomach and probably my liver are not terribly chuffed about the work they have to do dealing with lots of NSAIDs and Tylenol and CBD and topical lidocaine and menthol and all that stuff.

Listless shrug.  It is what it is.  My flare is tapering a bit at this point, at least.  I don’t like to anticipate it getting better (nor it getting worse) but I try to be optimistic, at least for me.  It is simply true that my pain could get better and stay relatively good for a while (and it could go the other way), and I will only find out as it happens.

Whether or not all of you will find out depends very much on the degree to which I share it here.  Of course, no one who sees things only on any of the Meta-owned social media will find out, because (obviously enough) I’m not able to share anything there anymore.  Maybe the occasional (very) odd person might find my stuff via Bluesky and Substack and TWFKAT, but if so, it’s hard to tell.

Whatever the case with respect to those matters, I am still just kind of tired and mentally enervated, so I’m not feeling too enthusiastic here.  I don’t really have anything good or interesting to report.  Nothing is happening in my life other than the steady cranking of the entropy machine, doing what it does.

Sorry.  The pain is very discouraging.  When it ebbs, I can even start to feel like my old self again, the “me” from thirty or more years ago.  But though I keep trying new things and approaches, and sometimes I even get some good results, it doesn’t seem prone to ebb* for very long at a time.

Okay, well, let’s wrap this up.  I hope you all had a good holiday (or are having a good holiday) and that you and those you love are doing well.  Unless I’m lucky, I expect I’ll write a post tomorrow.

*The more often I say “ebb” the more it feels as though I’m saying the name of some character‒perhaps some mountain man‒from The Dukes of Hazzard or The Andy Griffith Show.

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The forecast calls for uncertainty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I have rather blogged as mine own jealous curiosity than as a very pretence and purpose of unkindness.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 2nd of April in 2026 AD/CE, the 1st Thursday in April this year.  It has to be the first one.  Any date that is the 7th or lower has to be the first whatever day in a given month.

That’s probably fairly obvious, but I think it can be useful to review‒from time to time‒the patterns of things that are “obvious”.  It’s not likely that one will discover that these seemingly obvious things are oversimplified and not so obvious after all, but at least one will gain a slightly deeper feel for the things, rather than simply going through life with a bunch of predigested “facts” which one has never examined seriously.

That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  I don’t know if it’s deep or anything, but it’s at least a good-sounding excuse for me to overthink and overanalyze things as I am prone to do by nature.

I still have no indication that my Meta-based accounts are anything but permanently disabled.  Then again, I probably wouldn’t expect to have such an indication, since I haven’t even tried to use them.  I very quickly uninstalled the Meta-based apps I had on my phone (Threads and Instagram‒I did not have the Facebook app, because when I tried installing it once, it rapidly became very annoying, and I uninstalled it forthwith).

I miss some of the interactions on Threads a bit, but although I enjoyed following the exploits of some other people on there, no one actually paid any attention to me.  Even when I shared or posted words of distress and self-destructive feelings, almost no one even saw them, let alone providing any kind of support.

Not that this is an unusual situation, of course.  It certainly wasn’t unique to Threads, nor to Instagram*.  It’s not as though anyone on Bluesky or Substack has expressed any concern for my wellbeing.  So, I shouldn’t unfairly vilify the Z(f)uckerverse.  It is what it is.

But I came up with the term “metaverse” (dammit!) years and years ago, intending to use it to refer to the broader, connected reality of The Dark Fairy and the Desperado, as well as other works of my fiction, going all the way back to Ends of the Maelstrom, the first sci-fi/fantasy (or any genre) novel I ever finished.

That novel, all handwritten, is now lost, of course, along with all but a smattering of everything I ever had up to 2012.  So, the loss of, for instance, Facebook, is really just more of the same, and not even very much of that.  What’s Facebook compared to the cello I’d had since high school, or the piano (an unused one they’d had for many years) I’d been given by my in-laws when I graduated medical school, or the thousands of books and comic books I’d accumulated since I was very young?

Okay, so, if it’s so relatively minor, this debacle regarding Facebook et al, why am I harping on about it?

Well, it has only been three or four days.  I’m sure I’ll get bored of it soon.  But I still hold a deep grudge against the Zuckster for “stealing” that term from me, though I do recognize that I had no actual, reasonable, proprietary right to it.  It’s just frustrating, and he is the source of that frustration, however unintentional it was with respect to me.

I don’t really hold too much against him for the foibles of his social media, and only feel slightly ill-used for having been kicked off them.  I can use my time in better ways.

However, I did not open Brilliant or Babbel yesterday, despite my wish to get more use out of them.  I didn’t even get on Arxiv to see what’s going on in physics/math/computer science papers lately, which can often be intriguing.  I once found a paper by David Deutsch on there, and I could even follow it, more or less, though the mathematical formalism was a bit outside my expertise.

No, I’m afraid I have not yet been able to turn my mind toward more long-term-interesting and beneficial matters.  But my life isn’t over yet, at least not as I write this.  I suppose, depending upon when you read this, my life may be over.  Indeed, I aspire to have the sort of durability in my writing such that, eventually, more people will have read my work after my death than before.  I would, in fact, prefer it to be orders of magnitude more.

I won’t be around to know it, of course, but no one ever is.  That doesn’t mean that hopes for things to happen after one has died are necessarily irrational.  We just need to recognize that it’s not our future selves that we’re actually serving.  We are serving the image of our future selves that we have in the present.  But that’s all we ever really do.  Despite the words of Ted Stryker in Airplane II (see 1:19) the future never arrives; everything is always the present.

TTFN

*Which, to be fair to it, has delivered several times a pop-up screen saying that “someone thinks you might need some help” or something, and gave me links to support ideas and the suicide crisis line.  Mind you, they were links to things I’ve tried before, multiple times**, and none have been terribly helpful, but at least Instagram’s “heart” was in the right place.

**Of course, even something that has never happened could technically be said to have happened “multiple times”; it’s simply that the multiple is zero, and anything but a gleeb*** multiplied by zero gives you zero.  But that’s not the spirit of the expression.

***A gleeb is a number (or concept, I suppose) that I invented long ago.  A gleeb multiplied by zero equals one.  I worked through some of the algebra of it while I was “up the road” and it’s rather interesting.  For instance, a gleeb taken to any positive power is still just a gleeb.

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April, come she has. No contradictions allowed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“We would zig-zag our way through the boredom and pain”

It’s Monday again; indeed, it is the last Monday in March in 2026 (AD/CE), for whatever that’s worth.  This Monday shall never come again.

Then again, of course, no Monday shall ever come again.  Such is the nature of time.  This is one of the facts that makes senseless the expression “That’s a [measure of time] I’m not gonna get back”.  Well, duh!  You never get any of your experienced amounts of time back.  That’s the nature of time, and the nature of its directionality, dependent upon the second law of thermodynamics.

Even if one could rewind time, one would not “get a moment back” the way people talk about it.  If, like the events of a movie or other video story, one could rewind life, it would not be you (the self who spoke of getting the moment back) who would experience the events anew.  It would just be a return to an earlier state, in which you would again be experiencing all the same events, not merely as if for the first time, but actually for the first time.  The posterior events would be erased for you as you traveled back.

It’s not like playing a video game where you can “regenerate” at your most recent save point, but you can remember what happened to your character before it “died” so that you can learn from your mistakes.  There is no one playing your character (i.e., you) and able to learn from a repeated past.  You are not the player of the game, you are the character.  You are part of the game.  You are part of the movie, not watching it from outside.  If it resets, you reset; if it rewinds, you rewind, and all memory of any events that happened disappear along with the future.

Whether or not you will repeat the same events, like the characters of a movie/show, or if you may do something different, like a video game character, is less clear, but it doesn’t much matter.  You are still going through each moment once, effectively, and you can only learn from mistakes to affect your behavior in the future.  If your mistake kills you, you’re just dead.

Even if time were a closed loop‒if the future of the universe wraps around and becomes “the past” again, forming a closed and fixed structure, as appears to be possible in principle according to General Relativity‒you won’t get to experience it as happening again.  Each time, you will experience reality for the first time.

Just as there is no fixed self looking out from behind your mind, there is no external rememberer hovering over your reality, able to experience your experiences for the first time but as if not for the first time.  You are a phenomenon within reality, not a sojourner through reality that accumulates knowledge that could be used in reliving the past, but better.

If you could rewind yourself except for your mind, somehow retaining your memory of “the future”, that would not be truly returning to the past.  Rather, it becomes the next set of events in your future.  This demands an answer to the question of how it could be possible for you to become your earlier self and yet remember your later self, since your memories are functions of your brain.

This is what makes things like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia or brain damage so tragic‒they literally are injuries to what makes us ourselves.  If you lose all memories of your past, then in a very real sense, the person you were is already dead.

Of course, even in healthy states, without brain damage, your past self is still “dead” with every new moment that arrives.  Every time you sleep and then wake up, it may as well be that you have died and then been recreated in the morning, just with implanted memories from the previous person, the one who died.  There would be no way for you to know if there is no difference in your brain and the rest of your body.  Indeed, it’s in principle possible that this actually happens with each passing moment, or even each passing Planck time.

Only the past can be remembered.  Only the future, even in principle, can be planned and affected.  And only the ever-moving present can be experienced.  There is, of course, a continuity that is required for us to have any sense of a unified personhood at all, but as Sam Harris has pointed out (more than once) your memories of your past are merely thoughts in your mind in the present moment, as are your plans for the future.

So it really can make sense to “get over yourself”, in more than one way.  It’s worth recognizing that you’re mortal and‒whatever you may believe‒as far as we know, death is the end, and all that you were will be gone after that.  But it’s also worth recognizing that, in a nontrivial sense, each day all that you were the day before is already gone.

Still, though you are only existing for any given present moment, memory at least allows for us to learn and hopefully do better in the future than we would have if we didn’t have memory.  That’s why memory is a trait that gets selected for and is evolutionarily stable:  because its presence makes creatures with that trait or attribute more likely to survive and reproduce than those that do not have it, ceteris paribus.

As with most such subject-specific blog posts, I could go on and on about this.  A thousand (or, well, a lot of) other thoughts arise that could be expressed as I write what I do write.  But I have finite space and finite time (even if spacetime is infinite) in which to write this post, so I’ll stop here for the moment.

Welcome to the new week.  I hope it’s a good one for you.  Heck, I hope it’s a good one for everyone, even “bad” people (with the caveat that, “a good one” entails such people becoming better than they presently are).

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Man doth not yield himself unto the angles save through the weakness of his feeble vectors

It’s Friday.  It must be, because yesterday was Thursday, and by the conventions of the modern English-speaking world, the day after Thursday is Friday.

We could have named the days differently, and if we had, then different days would follow other different days, but they would still proceed in a consistent order.  A day naming system that changes its order from day to day and week to week would not be useful at all.

Similarly, we could name the numerals and numbers differently‒the names we use are fairly arbitrary‒but that would not change the deep nature of arithmetic.  Whatever the equivalent of 2 + 2 might be, it would still equal the equivalent of 4.

That which we call arroz, by any other name, would still be rice.

I am not using the lapcom today.  I felt a bit lazy yesterday afternoon, so I didn’t bring it with me (there was already cat food in my bag, so it was somewhat heavy).  Also, I am still sick, strictly speaking; in fact, I feel slightly worse this morning than I did yesterday morning.

But I do have some regret over not bringing the computer with me, because my thumbs are rather sore.  You might think that would be enough to motivate me to bring the lapcom with me every evening, but the person I am in the evening does not necessarily appreciate what things will be like for the person I am in the morning.

Intellectually, of course, I can know what the situation will be, and I do know it, at least implicitly.  But I cannot feel it in the moment; all I can feel is the resistance to bringing it at that moment, because the immediate extra weight feels much more salient than the discomfort I might feel the following morning.

This is natural, of course.  I suspect that you experience similar disparate and antithetical drives and resistances at different times, despite what you know in your “higher” brain.

This is one of the annoying things about the fact that there is no single, stable, consistent “self”, with a single terminal goal (to use some AI-related jargon), in the minds of humans and humanoids.  There is, instead, a fluid of vectors adding together in a high-dimensional phase space, with lengths and directions that change from moment to moment* in response to changing external facts and to feedback from its own internal states.

Willpower is a function of the brain.  It varies from person to person and from moment to moment.  It is also subject to fatigue.  This has been studied with a fair degree of rigor.  People who have recently been engaged in taxing mental tasks, like solving relatively challenging math problems or similar, are less able to resist (for instance) eating an offered cookie despite being on a diet or even being diabetic.

This stuff may be fairly obvious, but in any given moment, most of us are not mindful enough of our own internal states even to be aware of what might be our current relatively depleted will.

It’s analogous to a person who does strength training with free weights in a gym.  Imagine this person comes to the gym after a hard day that involved physical labor, perhaps more than they usually do.  Or perhaps the person is ill but feels they can tough things out.  In the worst situation, this can lead to catastrophic accidents with weights that are‒at that moment‒too heavy for the person to lift, even though at other times the person may have lifted them with relative ease.  At the very least, such a person is at risk of strain and injury that could impair their ability to exercise for some time.

The mind works much like this.  The brain is an organ, a physical, biological thing, and it is prone to illness and injury and fatigue, in addition to all the software-related weirdness it can instantiate (like having conflicting and/or illogical points of view about empirical facts, and various other forms of irrationality).

This is one reason it can be useful to engender strong habits, even ones that border on the dogmatic.  Because the brain works on habit‒it being simply unworkable to try to evaluate each and every situation de novo‒if one can set up good habits, they can protect one from some catastrophes.

For instance, one of the “dogmas” of gun safety is that one should treat every firearm as if it is loaded, even if one has literally just removed all of its bullets oneself, and one should therefore never point the gun at anything (or anyone) one is not prepared to shoot.  This can feel unreasonable, and in the short term, thinking only of that instance where one has just thoroughly unloaded and checked the weapon, it may seem strictly unnecessary.

But humans are not perfect reasoners‒I suspect that nothing is, and that perfect reasoning is impossible for any finite mind‒and when fatigued, they fall into more automatic behaviors rather than thinking everything through.  This is why it is good to train such automatic behavior to be what one wants it to be when one is able to think clearly.

So, treat every gun as if it is loaded.  Buckle your seat belt for even very short trips**.  Don’t keep sweets in your house if you’re diabetic.  If you’re trying to quit smoking, don’t hang out with people who are smoking and don’t go places where cigarettes are easy to get.  Ditto for other drugs of abuse.

Speaking of which, alcohol tends to screw all those things up.  One of the key effects of alcohol on human (and other animals’) nervous systems is to decrease or diminish what can reasonably be called willpower.  This is not its only deleterious effect.

Okay, well, my thumbs are a bit sore, so I’m going to bring this to a close for the day.  It probably goes without saying‒somewhat ironically‒that there is much more that I could write on this topic.  Perhaps I’ll return to it, and to other related subject matter, tomorrow.

There really should be a blog post tomorrow, given that the previous two Saturdays were surprisingly non-working days.  But, as with a coin flip (or nearly so), previous results don’t have any impact on where the outcome will land this time.

Either way, please try to have a good weekend.

*Lawfully, but in such a complex fashion that it is effectively almost a chaotic system.

**Unless you literally don’t mind the increased risk of injury or death.  It’s possible to be in such a self-destructive state***, but if you are going to accept that risk, try to make sure you really don’t care.  It’s easy enough to imagine one doesn’t mind getting injured or killed in a traffic accident, but when one is injured‒or killed‒it is too late to change one’s preferences, and the version of you who suffers injury may be quite put out with their previous self.  See above about the lapcom.

***e.g., Florida.

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Blog, we know what we are but know not what we may be.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again, and out of tradition I’ve started this blog with “Hello and good morning”, which you’ve already seen but might not have noticed.  Speaking of tradition, I’m also writing this post on my lapcom, partly for just a changeup, and partly because my thumb/wrist arthropathy has been acting up quite a bit, so I brought the lapcom back to the house with me on Tuesday evening.

Speaking of Tuesday evening going on to Thursday morning, I was out sick yesterday, and so I did not write a blog post.  I did work from “home” for a bit, because it was payroll day, and obviously I needed to get that done or else people won’t get paid.  But I wasn’t in any mood to write a blog post from the house.  I didn’t even have the energy to leave a little quasi-post like I did on last Saturday, just to let people know that I was not going to be writing the expected full post.

Honestly, I don’t feel terrific even today, but I do feel a bit better than I did yesterday, at least for the moment.  If human civilization were sane or even slightly reasonable, I would feel no qualms about taking a second day off, because no one else would expect otherwise.  But I cannot feel comfortable doing that, even if other people would not mind.  It’s a pathology, of course, but there it is.

Still, if I leave things at the office for too long, when I get back it becomes too stressful because there’s so much catch-up work to do (thank goodness, we got rid of all our mustard work long ago)*.  Luckily, I still have plenty of face masks available.  Indeed, I often consider trying to find a brand that I like and can wear every day, all day.

I’m not a fan of my face.  There are too many signs of the past 20 years or so on it.  It’s possible that these signs are things no one else would notice, but that hardly matters, because I am the one bothered by it, and I and the one stuck with this face.

It’s not an emergency.  I don’t feel like I must cover up my face, like Doctor Doom or the Phantom of the Opera or something.  It just annoys me.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t wish I looked like someone else, anymore than I wish I were someone else.

I can’t even see how that could work in principle.  If everything about me changed into someone else, I wouldn’t exist anymore, I would be someone else.  But that wouldn’t be me experiencing the process of being someone else; it would just be someone else.  Nothing of me would come along.

I guess I just would prefer it if I could be a better version of me.  I work on it, of course; I don’t just wish for it.  I’m always trying to improve in any way that I can.  And the good and bad thing about self-improvement is that there is no finish line.  One can always be better—by almost any criterion one might choose—than one currently is.

This is similar to—and may be related to—the nature of intelligence and ignorance.  Intelligence can increase without any known limit, in principle, but everyone is always infinitely ignorant and always will be.  There is always an uncountable infinity worth of potential information one could know but does not (just within, for instance, the digits of π alone, apart from the uncountably infinite other Real Numbers).

This is a blessing and a curse, as such things tend to be.  It is a curse in the sense that one can never know everything there is to know, and therefore, in principle, one cannot know that one knows the most important things to know.  On the other hand, it is a blessing to know that one can always become smarter, more knowledgeable, than one currently is.

You can’t keep building muscle indefinitely; you can’t run faster or swim faster or bike faster without limit.  New Olympic records are set by tiny, tiny margins.  But while there surely is a physical upper limit to possible human intelligence—based upon information theory, thermodynamics, neuroscience, general relativity and so on—as far as we can tell, no one has ever gotten close to that upper limit.  You can keep learning new things every day that you are alive**.

This is a notion I wish more teachers would explain to their students.  Yes, it’s true that different people have different aptitudes for different subjects.  But unless there is real and serious pathology, anyone can get to the goal in time.  Your fundamental limits are processing speed and memory.

If your onboard, RAM-style memory isn’t great (and no one’s is VERY great) then you can store things externally, using written language.  If your processing speed regarding, say, 17th century British literature, is slow, you may reasonably choose to do something else.  Had you but world enough and time, you could learn anything, but you don’t have world enough nor time.  In principle, though, you could learn it.

Motivation, drive, impulse is/are factors holding people back more than anything else, as far as I can see, and it’s perfectly understandable.  Thinking requires a lot of effort—fully 20% of our bodies’ calories are used by our brains***.  One wants to choose as wisely as one can just to what to apply that energy.

In principle, one cannot know for sure if one will make an optimal choice—that’s the whole “unknown unknowns” thing—but that’s part of the point of decision theory.  We have to make decisions with incomplete information, pretty much every single time.

That’s okay.  It’s much more fun to be surprised by the things one learns than just to have more of the same.  The most exciting non-personal moment in my lifetime so far was in 1998 when it first became clear that the universe was not merely going to keep expanding (rather than recollapsing) based on data in the supernova studies, but that the expansion of the universe was increasing in speed!  Literally, my picture of the whole universe changed, and it was amazing.  I cannot properly explain just how invigorating it was to learn about this.

Look at me, being slightly positive in my blog.  I must be ill, huh?  Anyway, that’s enough for today.  Presumably, I’ll be writing another post tomorrow, but I never make an absolute guarantee.

TTFN

*Sorry, I know it’s a stupid joke, but I’m sick.  Please give me a break.

**And in a certain sense, you do this no matter what:  at the very least, you learn what it is to experience that day.

***Though there is reason to suspect that some politicians use a significantly smaller percentage, as do some of the people who vote for them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Who calls me “villain”? Breaks my pate across? Plucks off my blog and blows it in my face?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.

I had to check the date on my phone a few times in a row to confirm that, yes, not only is it really Thursday, but it is also the 19th of March (in 2026 AD/CE).

It’s not that I thought I must have gotten the day and date wrong.  I keep track of these things and recheck these things all the time, often coming from different directions; I usually have at least a couple of methods by which I am able to reconstruct what day it currently is.  But I always feel‒a bit more strongly than is warranted‒that not only could I be wrong in principle (as is always the case) but that I am not likely to be right.

A similar thing occurs when I do the mental addition to update the various totals on “the board” when people get deals at work.  Intellectually, I know that I’m good at it, and that I’m rarely incorrect.  But “emotionally”, I don’t feel like I’m right.

Even after I check my numbers 3 different ways using Excel (there are 3 totals that should match, and if they do, it’s much more unlikely that I’m wrong), I don’t feel like I’m sure that it’s right, even though intellectually, it’s all but a certainty.  I mean, this is mathematics here, one of the few areas in which we can obtain answers with logical certainty.  And I’m pretty good at it.

I even occasionally deliberately say to myself, after confirming in those 3 ways that I got all the mental arithmetic correct, “Yes!  I am the king!”  It’s an attempt to feel good about myself in a slightly silly way, which is the only way I allow myself to feel good about myself.  But it doesn’t work much, if at all.  It feels like what it is:  a scripted, fictional remark.

This may be part of the problem I have long had with self-affirmation, autosuggestion type things.  If I say good things to myself about myself, I don’t believe them.  in fact, I feel very squirmy and uncomfortable inside when I try to say good things about myself, or to tell myself that I like or love myself.  It’s as though I’m committing some grotesque violation of ordinary decency.

I don’t feel as though I’ve done something truly horrible mind you; I don’t feel as though I’ve harmed some helpless person or otherwise victimized the innocent.  It’s more akin to sticking one’s bare hands into a big bowl full of maggots.  I just feel that I’m disgusting and pathetic and that I make myself more so by saying things that sound as though I’m pretending I’m not disgusting and pathetic.

I recognize these as emotions that are not good guides to the empirical world; intellectually, I can handle them, assess them, recognize their irrationality, and call the judgment made.  But I have not yet been able to shake those feelings, and they are not fun.

I cannot convince myself, down to my bones, that 2 plus 2 equals 4…at least not when I’m doing the figuring.  I know I’m right in a logical sense.  I’ve perceived no reason to doubt my answer, other than the stupid fact that I am the one making it.  But I cannot seem to shake‒or I have not yet been able to do so‒the idea that I may very well have the whole thing fundamentally wrong, and that this is not just a remote, theoretical possibility.

It’s quite frustrating.  I might even say that it’s maddening, except that it seems to be the madness, itself.  It doesn’t matter how well I know and understand something intellectually, how much I know, empirically, that I’m right about something.  Somehow, I always just seem to feel that I, in and of myself, am wrong.  And so must be most of the things I do, unless I am ridiculously careful and check and recheck and triple check* everything.  And even then, I just reduce my anxiety about things a bit.

I have real sympathy for Hamlet, who didn’t want to take vengeance upon his uncle for the murder of his father without being able to convince himself beyond all reasonable doubt that he was not being misled by the apparent ghost of his father.  It makes sense to “have grounds more relative than this” when it comes to killing the king of Denmark, even if you’re the prince.  You don’t want to kill someone in the name of justice or revenge unless you’re really darned sure that they deserve it, otherwise you are committing an irrevocable crime.

Doing arithmetic, on the other hand, is rarely so consequential**.  Neither is failing to turn off a bedside lamp before leaving my room in the morning.  Nor is even the possibility of having failed to lock one of my locks when leaving the house.

But these things often lead me to feel that squirmy misgiving, almost a kind of deep formication.  It’s very annoying.

Oh, I’m also never quite sure‒emotionally‒that no one is going to push me off the platform onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train at the station***, so I’m always glancing around to make sure no one’s right behind me or coming too close, and if they are, I pay significant attention to them, preparing to dodge or fight back if attacked.

You’d think, given how often I think about the benefits of being dead, that I would be less worried about being randomly murdered at the train station.  But there’s something infuriating about the prospect that someone else could choose to kill me.  That would really tick me off (so to speak).

Anyway, it’s weird, and it’s quite frustrating.  It’s also exhausting.

They say there shall be no rest for the wicked.  I know that’s just part of a prophecy, and therefore bullshit, but in the real world, there shall often be no rest for those who feel that they are wicked.  The actual wicked, of course, probably often sleep the deep, deep sleep of the innocent (as Radiohead sang), because they do not see themselves as wicked.

They probably see themselves as perfectly fine, even great.  Some of them even seem to imagine that they are the greatest (whatever) of all time, and they often suffer no serious consequences for that intellectual failure.

Justice is not a natural force, unfortunately (despite all the bullshit, misguided, popular talk about “karma”); it’s something that has to be forced, if you will, that has to be constructed.  And the people who are most careful about trying to get things right are generally the sorts of people less likely to want to be “in charge” of things.

“And enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their courses turn awry / And lose the name of Action.”

TTFN

*Not to be confused with Triple Sec or whatever that liqueur is.  I’ve often wondered if there was ever a Double Sec or even a Mono Sec/Uni Sec.  Probably not.  I suspect the true etymology is based on something that does not mean “threefold” in any sense.  But I could be wrong about this.

**Even the failure of that Climate Orbiter that famously broke up in the atmosphere of Mars was due not to an arithmetic error, but an error of units:  One group involved in the project was using metric units, the other was using so-called imperial units, and nobody seems to have checked.  I cannot imagine what I would have felt if I had made that error.  Seppuku would probably feel too generous.

***This occurred to me because, as I was writing, I was on the train platform getting ready to board the oncoming train and I experienced that minor paranoia, as I nearly always do.

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Is it small talk if you discuss the weather despite being alone?

Well, I brought the lapcom back to the house with me yesterday evening, but nevertheless I am writing this post on my smartphone.  Why?  Because the lapcom is more inefficient to get out of my bag and put back in my bag, and the smartphone is much easier to unsheathe and restow‒it just sits in my front pocket when not in use.  I can also use it to check the temperature, which is a bit chilly this morning even here in south Florida.  I’m sure that it’s quite a bit worse for regions north of us that have been hit by the wave of unpleasant recent weather.

I don’t find it unpleasant for it to get a bit cool down here‒55 degrees Fahrenheit* with a bit of overcast and some rain feels like autumn up north where I grew up, and that was always my favorite season.  It’s usually rather easy to adjust by wearing more clothes and moving around a bit if one feels chilly.

On the other hand, there’s not much to do about the heat and humidity other than to stay inside air conditioned buildings.  That isn’t very much fun, unfortunately, especially when one lives in a state that is touted for its beautiful and interesting nature.  After a point, though, one can take off as many clothes as one likes, but one will not get cooler; one will only be at risk for sunburn in rather uncomfortable places.

The worst part, though, is the humidity.  Yes, humans developed in sub-Saharan Africa, so we’re built well for endurance in hot environments (humans have more sweat glands per square inch of skin than any other animal).  But humidity is another matter.  Humidity is almost like an electronic counter measure to sweat’s ability to cool the body.  Sweat works by evaporative cooling; like blowing on soup, taking away the warmest liquid molecules lowers the average temperature of those remaining, and so on.

But evaporation depends at least partially on the differential in concentration between the liquid and the gas “above” it.  If the air is already saturated (or nearly so) with water vapor, there is going to be significantly less tendency for net evaporation to occur, and thus there will be less cooling.

This is why the reassuring and somewhat comical statement, “Yeah, but it’s a dry heat” is actually pertinent and indeed positive.  If the air is dry, and if they have adequate water, humans can tolerate surprisingly intense heat.  But when it’s humid, things don’t work nearly as well.

Also, when it tends to be humid and rainy a lot, one finds fungi and algae and the like growing on almost every immobile surface, as well as on some that are mobile, such as human intertriginous areas.

Anyway, to make a long diatribe slightly longer by summarizing it, I don’t mind cooler weather, but humidity is very annoying when it’s warm.

As for other matters, well, the holiday is over from yesterday, and I did not get to eat any corned beef and cabbage.  That’s a bit disappointing.  The next major holiday (which is coming soon) is the Passover/Easter holiday.  There’s no particular food related to these holidays that I like, though, nor really much of anything else come to think of it.

I did get into the St. Patrick’s Day spirit by drawing a shamrock yesterday, then scanning it and coloring it and fiddling with it a bit between other things at work.  Here, this is how it’s turned out so far:

It’s nothing terribly impressive, but it’s at least one very tiny, mild, creative act.  Not that writing this blog isn’t creative, but it’s not as creative as writing fiction, or not creative in the same way.  And drawing a picture is closer to writing a story than to writing a blog post.  Though I have to admit, at first glance drawing and writing would seem to be somewhat too different to compare.  And yet, I think I’m not the only person who has a deep, intuitive feeling that they are part of a strong, self-similar group.

It’s quite curious.  I wonder if such seemingly odd combinations are common among intelligent life forms.  Of course, if this planet is the only place in the universe on which intelligent life exists, then it’s a universal attribute of such life, if we count only creatures that use languages and create and use artifacts.

Well, this has been a weirdly inconstant blog post, especially for a relatively short one.  It’s not just meandering around among topics, it’s ricocheting.  I would prefer to meander; ricocheting seems like it would be very bad for my chronic back and joint pain.

*If it were 55 degrees Celsius, it would not be chilly at all.  Indeed, many people would be dying around here from the heat.  If it were 55 Kelvin, then, yeah, that would definitely be chilly.  Not that anyone would feel it, because we would all be dead if it were that cold.