life

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If you prick us, do we not blog?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday again.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m fairly sure it’s Thursday.  I have on my Thursday trousers*, at least.

Yep, it’s Thursday; I checked my phone’s readout.  I was pretty sure anyway, but when my memory jibes with an external measure of which I have no current reason to be suspicious, that drives my credence even higher than it already was.  Most days I don’t need to double-check.  Most days, my internal experience of reality is persistent and consistent enough that I’m well aware of what day it is, usually even when I “first” wake up, to such a degree that if my smartphone’s readout gainsaid that, I would suspect that the phone was malfunctioning.

Today, though, I am mildly fuzzy-headed, relative to how I usually am.  I spent most of yesterday with some manner of persistent and non-peristaltic abdominal pain that left me very grumpy; it was good that I got started on payroll early and finished it early.

I didn’t leave the office early.  No, no.  I didn’t leave until nearly 7 pm, though it was different people who kept me late this time.

That’s part of the problem with things being so lax for my coworkers:  I have to be at the office first every morning (I do get there earlier than absolutely necessary, since I can’t sleep in the morning, anyway, and it’s better to travel before rush hour).  And I am also the last to leave at night, since I lock up the office.  Yet I live farther away than almost everyone else who works there, and I don’t drive.  So I am subject to the vagaries of each day’s least time-sensitive person, whoever it might be on any given day.  Often, the people who stay late do not arrive on time in the morning.  They are often also the people who work into and sometimes through lunch.

I ought to find a way to punish these people.  I ought to take extreme vengeance upon them, “in this life or the next”.  But I probably will do no such thing.

Anyway, that’s that.  I’m a bit fuzzier than usual because I didn’t even start eating any dinner or winding down until 9 o’clock or so last night.  And here I am at the train station slightly less than eight hours later.  So, plainly I did not have a full night’s sleep‒but that never happens, anyway.

On to other matters.

I still don’t know what to do about my fiction writing.  Writing this blog every day increases the daily readership by a significant margin, such that, in the few weeks in which I was doing 2 days a week, there were only about two thirds as many visits per day that I posted.  But, of course, it’s not as though I reach very many people even on my best days.

I am probably wasting my time doing this, both in potentially boosting the reach of my fiction, and in trying to improve my mental health by talking about it (there’s no sign of that making any difference, is there?).

I don’t know.  I suspect that if I suddenly just stopped writing this blog, there are only maybe two people in the world who would notice quickly, and they are both family members.  A few others might eventually vaguely realize that they were no longer getting posts from that weird guy who has insomnia and depression and goes on and on and on about it all the time.  Perhaps they’d wonder whether I just stopped blogging, or if I died, and if so, whether that was due to accident or illness or suicide

Actually, it’s reasonable in many‒perhaps most‒cases to call suicide a death due to illness.  It’s just a kind of illness that hasn’t been recognized as such throughout most of history, and still is not met with the attitude that would be useful from most people who interact with its sufferers.  Of course, it isn’t caused by any virus or bacteria (as far as we know) and so is not contagious in any straightforward sense (though memetic contagion cannot be ruled out in all cases).

Then again, people have only known about the contagious nature of things like smallpox and typhoid fever and the black death and the flu and various other infectious and parasitic diseases for a very short time.  But those are the comparative low-hanging fruit of illnesses, prevention and treatment-wise.  When a disease is caused by a definitive pathogen, an invader, there is a target that can be eliminated, if possible, to the unmitigated benefit of the one invaded.  It was a clear and definitive good for people when, for instance, smallpox was eradicated.

Problems related to malfunction or dysfunction or conflicting function of the organism itself, on the other hand, are much trickier.  The structure and function of a biological organism is akin to a vast and vastly complicated Rube Goldberg machine, where interventions in one region can have hard-to-predict effects elsewhere.  And, of course, once we’ve eliminated or at least significantly curtailed all the “easier” targets, then only harder ones remain.

Then people will complain about the slow pace of medical progress and the fact that some people must take lifelong medications to treat things like diabetes and high blood pressure, imagining that this fact is only and entirely due to, say, profiteering on the part of pharmaceutical companies.  Meanwhile, some of them will actually complain about and even resist the use of such things as vaccines, which have given them the luxury of being able to worry about things other than, say, how many of their children will die of measles encephalitis or will be crippled by polio.

It’s enough to make one want to paraphrase Colonel Jessup from A Few Good Men, and remind people that they rise and sleep under the blanket of the health and longevity provided by medical science and then question the manner in which it has been provided**.

I don’t know how I got onto that tangent.  Neither do I know why I got onto that tangent.  It’s all pointless, anyway.  I hope this hasn’t been too disjointed a blog post.  I also hope that you all have a good day, and a good rest of the week, and a good upcoming month, and a good rest of the year, and a good rest of your lives, and a good rest of eternity.

As for me, I’d be pleased just to get a good rest.  But I don’t expect that to happen any time before I die.

TTFN

*Yes, I have a pair that I wear specifically and only on Thursdays.

**But they don’t question it in any honest, serious, intellectual sense, such as would entail actually studying and deeply understanding even basic undergraduate level biology (to pick up a  weapon and stand a post, so to speak).  It’s remarkable how many problems seem so simple to those who don’t really, actually know Jack Shit about them.

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Surprise! It’s a Monday morning blog post

It’s Monday, March 25th‒only 9 more shopping months remain until Christmas‒and I’m writing a blog post today (on my smartphone) instead of working on my short story, even though I brought my laptop with me when I last left the office.  I left (slightly) early on Thursday, and did not go in on Friday, because I was feeling quite ill.  I don’t know exactly what the nature of the illness was/is, but it was probably a respiratory virus.  I’m mostly over it now.

I’m still at the house while beginning this, because I’m waiting for Uber/Lyft rates to come down to reasonable levels before I accept one.  It should not cost all that much to get a ride less than 5 miles away, especially when I tip generously*.  I also have a bus pass available, which is quite a bit cheaper, but that would take quite a bit longer, whether I use it to get to the train or all the way to the office.  So, I’m not going to do that today, probably, but I may do so in the near future (Also, there are no bathrooms on the buses, but there are ones on the trains; this, for me, can be a serious concern).

I decided to write a post today mainly because I feel that I’m releasing most of my connection, such as it is, to the larger world by writing fewer posts.  Certainly, my readership has declined by a significant percent per post already.  Of course, I doubt that more than a handful of people would notice that I was gone even if I stopped completely.  I don’t know if I’ll keep this up or not, but I don’t think I can keep going back and forth.  I have to have some kind of mental momentum/inertia** to keep doing one thing; bouncing from one to another doesn’t seem to work well for me.

Obviously I would like to keep writing my stories, but if I go back to that 4 to 5 days (or more) per week, I would lose practically all sense of connection with the outside world other than weekly calls with my sister.  I like those weekly calls, of course, but at least when I write my blog posts, I know that a dozen or two people are, in principle, aware of my existence, and at least some of them actually read my stuff.

I guess that’s the sort of immediate feedback with activation of dopaminergic centers of the brain (the nucleus accumbens and related structures) upon which social media and similar situations depend, and of which they take advantage.  But it is (almost) all that I have, really, so that’s that.  It’s not as though I have any friends.

My sister lives in the path of the upcoming solar eclipse (which doesn’t narrow her location down by much, so I don’t think I’m being indiscreet for saying so), and she invited me to come visit to see it.  I really was going to try; I renewed my state ID to make travel easier, and I looked into bus and train and airfare, and they all seemed not too unreasonably expensive (unless you want a private compartment on a train, which would be cool, but would be ridiculously costly).  Unfortunately, I don’t think I can do it.  The prospect of traveling in cramped quarters for even the length of a plane ride seems just too unpleasant to tolerate.

I’m sorry about it; it would be great to see my sister and neat to experience a solar eclipse.  But the neatness thereof would not outweigh the prospect of the trip.  It’s pretty pathetic, I know, but then I don’t think I’ve ever specifically claimed that I was not pathetic.  My frequent readers will probably agree that I have been wise not to so claim.

I’m not sure what to do about this writing situation.  I sometimes consider just writing my fiction and maybe trying to do voice recordings a little later in the day, then editing and posting those as YouTube videos and embedding those as posts here.  I had reasonably good positive feedback when I did that before, but I don’t know how long it would last.  Also, I don’t know if I would lose people who prefer to read rather than to listen to a “video”, what I call an audio blog.

It’s probably all pointless, anyway.  I don’t think many people will probably ever read my work, fiction or nonfiction, or listen to my talk or my songs.  Likewise, though I have technically done a small part to add to the scientific knowledge of humanity, specifically relating to gliotoxin***, I’m not likely ever to make any contributions to quantum field theory or particle physics or cosmology, because while I think I am capable of contributing to them, there’s too much catch-up necessary, and I am limited more in energy even than in time‒there’s too much to which I have to adapt myself from day to day, and that burns my willpower up like nobody’s business.

It’s not as though I can just stop working.  At the beginning of a week, I can find the energy to start reading texts and other things relating to the pertinent fields (not just quantum ones, ha ha), but by the end of any given Monday, I am already so mentally drained that, come Tuesday, I don’t usually crack a single text.

I am, regrettably, not independently wealthy, so I can’t just go off and study.  I am also not mentally suited to seeking out and applying to graduate programs in appropriate fields, nor would I know quite where to begin.  I’m also pretty old to start such a thing, though I consider that less of a concern.  Mainly it’s just an “executive function” issue, as they say.  Also, I don’t think I could in good conscience accept loans or grant money for education.  I don’t think I’m a good risk; I’m too likely to kill myself sometime before finishing any academic program.

It’s not impossible for an autodidact to achieve at least some things‒after all, everyone is really self-taught, since it’s not as though anyone can do the learning for someone else.  They can only point the way; everyone has to walk the path individually.

I’m very tired, though.  If I could sleep decently, it would be easier, I think, but maybe I’m wrong.  Like the fella once said, it would be a real kick in the head for me to develop good sleep and find that I didn’t feel any better, would it not?

It’s a test I’m unlikely to encounter.

Well, that’s enough for today.  I expect I’ll write another post tomorrow.  Have a good day.

*Of course, like restaurant owners in America, Uber et al rely on tips to make up a good portion of their drivers’ pay; that way they can keep a bigger chunk of the fees for themselves and pay less out of their own pockets.  I would say they should in good conscience do otherwise, but they’re in something like a Nash equilibrium (as are all the various American restaurateurs) in that if they change their practices, they will be outcompeted by others who do not, and no one will be helped overall.  It’s one of those situations in which true collective action or legislation would be required to correct the inadequacy.

**Remember, inertia doesn’t just refer to an object’s tendency to remain at rest, but also to its tendency to continue moving in a straight line (or at least along a geodesic) at a constant velocity.

***Don’t bother looking into it.  It’s esoteric and not terribly interesting for those not working in mycology.

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Won’t you spring into silence with me?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of my old, traditional blog posts.  It’s also my second and the planned last blog post for this week.

In the morning, I entertained trying to write a post in the afternoon yesterday, and I even thought about it in the afternoon for a bit.  But there was just too much noise and irritation, and I couldn’t summon the concentration.  This is a bit similar to what often happens with my thoughts about studying during slow time at the office.  I consider it often, and in the morning, while I’m walking, if I’m listening to some science-oriented book, I think with truly eager anticipation about cracking open one of the texts I have at the office.

But the overhead noise and the people being late and saying silly things and all that just wears down my concentration.  I have to use all my energy just not to go berserk and/or leave the office.  Even when I am the one who chooses the overhead music playlist, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday, it’s not enough.  The only playlist I want is the original sound of silence, and I don’t mean the song by Simon and Garfunkel.  I mean silence, like that abyss between the stars I mentioned a few days ago.

There’s a reason Sailor Saturn is my favorite Sailor Senshi.  She’s the sailor of silence, the bringer of total destruction (and also rebirth, but no one’s perfect).

Anyway…

I walked to the train yesterday.  It was a good day for it, since it was relatively cool down here.  I also wrote a little over a thousand words on Extra Body, and that’s also good, of course.  I really find it tempting to want to write some on it every day, but I fear that I would lose my motivation if I did.  Also, as I’ve said before, this blog is my only frequent contact with the “outside world”, and my only personal “cry for help”, though that last part isn’t doing so well at its purpose‒which makes it pretty typical for things that I try, come to think of it.

The whole thing highlights one of the big problems with the various forms of serious mental illness:  The very nature of the problem significantly hinders the ability of the sufferer to seek or ask for, let alone to obtain, help.  If no outside person actually does anything, no assistance arrives, except perhaps after some true catastrophe, by which time it is often too late.

I suppose part of my problem in using this blog for that purpose is that I leave readers subject to the bystander effect.  Read about it.  It’s quite disheartening, and is yet another way the world sucks.  Basically, a person is more likely to help someone in need if he or she is the only one who can help.  When there are more people around, not only is each individual less likely to provide assistance, but the overall chance of anyone helping the person in need is less than if there was just one person to help.  At least, that’s if I recall the overall data about the effect well.

The most famous case of it turns out not to have been as clear-cut an instance as is often believed, so I won’t describe or link it here.  But there is some data demonstrating that people are less likely to offer aid to those in immediate need if there are other people around.

There’s at least a fair chance that someone will catch any events surrounding someone crashing and burning on their smartphone, though, and will share the video to social media.  If anyone ever wonders why I often express the sentiment that the human race ought to be destroyed, it’s these sorts of things that engender such a sentiment.

I don’t really know what else to write about today.  I’d love to discuss psychology and physics and math and economics and biology and philosophy, not to mention writing, but I’m frankly just exhausted.  I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel less well-rested after getting up than I did when I went to bed.  This is not unusual.

Also, the arthrosis in the base of my thumbs is getting worse, and I have not yet figured out any adequate therapeutic intervention.   Even doing the small amount of note-taking by hand that is required by my job is quite uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not horrific pain or anything like that.  I’ve had and continue to have far worse.  It’s just yet another straw laid across the dromedary’s hump, which would be fine if there were a good reason to keep carrying the load, but I have no such reason; I merely have the habit.

Life, for me, may be merely that:  a bad habit that I need to break.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week, and so on.  I hope you’re having a good first few days of Spring in the northern hemisphere; I hadn’t realized on Tuesday that the equinox was that day, slightly earlier (from a Gregorian calendrical point of view) than is typical, and by the time I did, the post had already been published.  Oh, well.  I’m probably the only one who cares, anyway.

TTFN

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Tuesday for the price of one day

Okay, well…it’s Tuesday morning, and this is the first of two planned blog posts for this week.  If there is any person out there in Hell’s creation who really used to look forward to starting his or her week with my Monday morning blog post, I apologize.  I regret causing you any disappointment.  On the other hand, causing disappointment is one of my greatest talents, so at least you’ve been exposed to that facet of my character.  I don’t know if one could properly call it a creative ability, but it is something for which I have a knack.

I did do some fiction writing yesterday, after walking to the train.  In fact, I mistook how much I had written, feeling that I hadn’t gotten even one page done, so I continued to the top of the following page only to realize it was the second page of the day.  I wrote over 1400 words; I’m at least making progress.

As I said, I walked to the train yesterday, and in addition, I walked back to the house in the evening.  Indeed, according to my pedometer, I walked about 14.7 miles yesterday in total.  I did not walk this morning because I have developed a modest blister on the bottom of my right big toe.  It’s quite annoying, because it’s not as though I just started walking again.  Last week I walked well over thirty miles in total, wearing the same effing make and model of shoes I wore yesterday.  Why should I have just yesterday developed a blister?  It seems absurd, but reality, for better or worse, is not amenable to appeals.

I suppose it’s good for me to take a break after a day that included nearly three fifths of a marathon worth of walking, though apart from the blister and my left knee soreness‒the latter of which is almost chronic‒I don’t feel particularly worn down.  I did have trouble getting to sleep last night after having walked so much in the evening, which was somewhat annoying, since I had already gotten back to the house later than usual.  It would have been nice if at least I could have slept more deeply once I did fall asleep, but that was of course not going to happen.  So, I’m quite tired.

What else is new, right?

I don’t know what else to discuss today.  The equinox is coming this week, but I figure Thursday would be a better day to talk about that.  It’s not exactly exciting, to be honest.  Up north, the coming of Spring is a positive thing, but in Florida, mostly it just presages the bulk of the year during which the heat and humidity are stultifyingly intense.  Believe me, when you walk 6 miles in Florida most of the year, you look as if you’d just gone swimming, because your sweat does not evaporate.

There’s a bit of a cool and rather strong breeze blowing this morning, which is a surprise, and I did not wear a jacket or a heavy shirt.  That’s okay.  The train will be here within the next 5 minutes according to the schedule and the announcement.  By evening, unless prior weather reports have been completely superseded, it will be plenty warm.

Oh, I did stumble upon an interesting book yesterday while skimming through recommendations based on a decision-theory book I bought.  It was a computer science book, geared toward undergrads and grad students but not really requiring that one be in that situation.  Its purpose is to teach a broad primer on computer science from the bottom up by walking through the process of building a (fairly simple) computer, writing and setting up an operating system, and then making it able to play games such as Tetris.  The authors even provide links to resources so the reader can actually do that building, so it’s not just an intellectual exercise.  They start with logic gates and go to the end, so the overall system is called “Nand to Tetris”, though that isn’t the title of the book.

I think this is great, because modern computers have become so sophisticated and complex that most people who program probably learn to do it without getting educated in the underlying systems and how they work, how Boolean Logic works and is instantiated, up to machine code and the like.  But these are the things I have always wanted to understand better.  My CS 100 class in college just taught us how to program in Pascal.  That was fine, as far as it went, but that kind of programming is just following more ordinary kinds of logic and instruction-giving.

If I had taken extensive coursework in computer science and electrical engineering, I’m sure I would have gotten into such things.  But that wasn’t my major, and I didn’t have time to take a boatload of electives.  If I could have taken courses in all the possible areas in which I might have been interested, I would probably still be in college, and my educational costs would probably have reached a level comparable to the price of an aircraft carrier, or at least of one of the military planes that uses them.

Anyway, I got the Kindle edition of the book.  Being a book by and about computers, it is well formatted to work with the e-book reader format, which is itself a good sign.  Also, the reviews in general are glowing, and the comments they make seem to demonstrate that this is exactly the sort of book I’d like to bring my basic understanding to a better level, from my point of view.  Who knows, maybe I’ll end up doing the project?

If I’m going to be a supervillain, I’m going to need to be able to build my own doomsday devices and robot servants, after all!

Of course, I have a whole slew of books I want to read in addition to this, and I haven’t gone any farther on Quantum Field Theory.  The audio files in which I read aloud just take up so much memory when I use them, and Google starts trying to entice me to buy more storage because (gasp!) I’ve now reached 80% of present capacity.  That’s only taken, what, seven or eight years?  Better send Google more money or before I know it I’ll be at 85%.

Anyway, I don’t think the audio has made me read any better or improved my understanding.  It nudged me a little, but not enough.

That’s enough for today, I think.  I mean to do some walking tomorrow, and some fiction writing, and I keep dreaming that I might write something more topical here in the afternoon and post it, but with the noise and nonsense at work, that often becomes all but impossible.

I guess we’ll find out what happens together.

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“What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars.”

It’s Friday, and presumably I’m not working tomorrow.  I don’t think I will work even if it turns out I am working, if you take my meaning.  I’m too tired.  My coworker was out sick yesterday, and so were some other people.  Unfortunately, I’m not sick, apart from the chronic, sick-in-the-head sort of sickness with which you all are no doubt familiar.

I’m writing this on my phone, though I brought my laptop computer with me yesterday.  I had thought to whip out a draft of a blog post on it then write a page of Extra Body before editing the blog post, but now I’m having to wait so long for an Uber that I decided just to take one into the office, anyway.

I hate how Uber always tries to get you to do the “share a ride” thing.  I wish they would stop suggesting it to me, or that there was some setting in the app that would let me tell them never to offer me a shared ride.  In the unlikely event that I want to share a ride, I’ll select that option from the start.  Stop “nudging” me.  It’s unpleasant enough for me to have to deal with the fact of the driver; I don’t want to share the back seat with some other stranger.

Actually, if I’m going to “share a ride” I’ll just take the flipping bus and pay pennies on the dollar, as the saying goes.  I really should just do that, anyway.  Uber and Lyft are bad habits, and not cheap ones.  In fact, I ought just to be walking to and from the train in the mornings, since riding the bike makes my back and hips absolutely scream with pain afterwards (which is very disheartening).

I took half a Benadryl again to try to help me sleep last night.  I don’t think it actually helped me rest, but I do feel groggy and incoherent this morning, so it’s had some effect, subjectively speaking.  I don’t know if you readers can tell, though.  It may well be that, from your point of view, I’m always more or less equally incoherent.

I feel that I’m becoming more and more decoherent with every day.  I wonder if my wave function is collapsing.  Can the Born Rule be applied to a human…or to whatever I am, for that matter?

I’m being silly, I know.

In a sense I suppose the Born Rule could apply to an individual if that individual makes a decision based on a quantum measurement.  There is, apparently, an app that allows you to do just that; it’s connected to a beam splitter in some lab somewhere, through which one photon at a time is being sent, and it tells you which direction a given photon ends up being measured.  Thus, you can make a truly random decision if you so desire‒as far as physics can currently tell, a fundamentally random decision.

A coin flip or a die roll is not fundamentally random, though for practical purposes it may as well be.  We don’t have access to enough information to predict a given outcome on a fair coin or die, but in principle it is possible.  Whereas with a photon going through a beam splitter, we have a completely, in-principle, unpredictable process.  The Nobel Prize was recently awarded to Aspect et al for their experiments that tested and confirmed the Bell inequalities, thus disproving anything but the most esoteric forms of “hidden variables” descriptions of quantum mechanics.

Sorry.  That was one of my weird tangents.  I’m a bit too mentally fatigued to restrain myself very well.

This sort of thing happens in real life, too.  Yesterday, I was talking about something to do with some song that came on the playlist to my boss, and I went off on some esoteric tangents about music and stuff, and I could finally just see his eyes start glazing over, so I pulled up short.  Then I caught myself looking up to see if I could find someone else in the office with whom to share some of my trivia and my thoughts about songs and various other things.

I caught myself in time, though, and retreated to my desk.  Then someone asked to change the music playlist to some pathetic new artist and related crap that wasn’t nearly as interesting.  I briefly put in my earphones and listened to some of the Feynman lectures on physics to block out the noise.  That didn’t work for long, though, because I kept having to do office stuff that required interaction with living humans.  And then, of course, I had to work through lunch, because three people got sales all at once, just as lunch arrived.

I hate my life.  I really do.  It’s not just work that I hate‒at least that involves some purpose, however unfulfilling.  I also hate my time “off”, my lack of friends, my apparent inability to be a friend, and my inability to be able to fucking sleep, along with many other things.

I’m so tired of it all.  I’m tired of writing this blog, but I feel stressed at the prospect of not writing it.  I don’t get tired of writing fiction so much as feel it’s an exercise in futility, and so I generally don’t get started anymore.

Then again, everything in the universe, ever, is just an exercise in futility.  As Charles Halloway said*, “Where do you come from?  The dust.  Where do you go to?  The grave.”  The same could be said of every planet and star and cluster and galaxy and every bit of the observable universe and everything else that may be beyond it‒metaphorically speaking, anyway.  Dust is something within the universe, as are graves, so it seems unlikely that the universe could come from dust.  But I think you get my point.

It’s that there is no point.

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This is the way the whirled Ns knot…

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday morning, which long-time readers will be able to tell from the opening line of this blog post, even if they don’t happen to have the day of the week displayed on their computers.  Does that actually happen, anymore?  Are there people who have smartphones and tablets and laptop computers and desktop computers where the computer‒they are all computers‒does not keep them informed of the day and date?

Based on some of the things I see at the office, you would imagine it to be thus, but I think that’s mainly a function of people not paying attention.

Speaking of people not being as sharp as they might be, I was a serious mess yesterday.  I’m not at all sure that my blog post was coherent, but I know that at work I struggled to be sensible.  Numerous times while I was there I lost track of what I was doing, and had to shake myself into focus.  It’s a good thing I prepare for the payroll ahead of time and that the boss looks at the results before I send the numbers in.  Also, it’s good that I do it every week, so it doesn’t require as much concentration as it would if I were doing it for the first time.

I did not write any on Extra Body yesterday, despite my hopeful intentions.  I left the office after lunch, with my boss’s blessing (so to speak) because he and everyone else could tell that I was really a mess.  If I were someone with a drug problem, they would probably think I was using.

I wish I could say that I had been able to get back to the house and go to sleep and sleep until time to get up.  Well, I did get back to the house, of course; that much is true.  But it took me a long time to be able to get to sleep, despite half a Benadryl.  I also started waking up at a little after 11pm (!).  I didn’t get up then, of course, but I kept going through my frequent awakening more or less from then on, until I finally got up five minutes before my alarm.

I feel more rested than yesterday, but that’s not saying very much.  It’s like beating your personal best on the 100 meter dash when your personal best was 5 minutes.  My chronic pain doesn’t help any of this.

I’m sorry, I wish I could write about more interesting things, or even that I knew what readers would like to read.  It seems that unpleasant things are all that’s ever on my mind.

I know a fair amount about various science topics and obviously about medical matters, and some mathematics and some philosophy and psychology and (ugh) politics and whatnot.  But it’s very difficult for me to find the energy to do anything interesting because I’m always tired, I’m always stressed, I’m always in pain, and I never get enough sleep.

I don’t know if I’m going to keep doing this much longer.  I didn’t even bring my computer back with me last night; I’m writing this post on my smartphone.  I’m tempted to go back to doing at most once a week blog posts, and trying to do fiction on the other mornings.  But I feel this blog is the only strong connection I have with the wider world out there, other than my sister.  This is my only means of reaching more than one person.  It’s also my only good means of sending out my distress call, my cry for help to the world.  At least, it’s the only one I seem capable of using.

It’s not very good at that, though.  There just aren’t all that many people who read it, and though I get some encouraging words from time to time, that’s only going to have a limited effect.  If you’re trying not to drown, it can be nice for someone to shout for you to keep swimming, that you can do it, that you just have to keep treading water…but only if more concrete help is on the way, and you just need to stay above water until it arrives.  If there is no actual boat or floaty ring or rope or lifeguard coming, then at best you just become a spectacle, where onlookers perhaps try to guess just how long you’ll be able to keep afloat before you finally go under for the last time.

At least I guess I’ve been able to offer that bit of entertainment.  I wonder if anyone has been making bets on length of time and specific outcomes for me.  If anyone has, let me know‒I think I would find it funny.  Don’t tell me what you bet on, whether it be how long until I die or by what means I will die or what have you; I don’t want to be unfairly biased either in your favor or against you.  But it would be funny to learn that there were spectators who were willing to admit that they’re morbidly curious just to see if I’ll actually die, and when.

That’s enough of that for today.  I don’t know what I’ll do from here on out.  It was tempting just to drop onto the tracks in front of the train as it was arriving, and sometimes I feel like I don’t give a shit if I inconvenience all the passengers.  But of course, I do give a shit about that, at least so far.  I don’t want to screw up everybody’s day.  The world is hard enough as it is.

Also, it would be a frightening way to die, and I’m not sure I’m bold enough for it.  You have to overcome really powerful instincts to do something like that, which is no doubt why many suicides are associated with drugs and alcohol.

I don’t know.  I might go back to writing fiction every day except Thursdays.  Or I may stop writing at all.  Or I may just collapse and fall apart and give up, I don’t know.  I’m so very very very very tired and uncomfortable.  And I have no real reason to expect it to get any better.

TTFN

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Below average night, average post

I had a horribly interrupted and just generally bad sleep last night.  One might imagine, after decades of insomnia, one would be relatively inured to the paucity of sleep one gets, and that the relative worsening of a single night would make little difference, but it doesn’t appear to be so.

Of course, it’s possible that something else is making me feel particularly horrible, and it has nothing to do with my exceptionally fractured night’s sleep.  It’s also even possible that the two facts are causally linked but in the other direction, and that whatever is making me feel bad is what made my sleep worse than usual, not the other way around.  It’s difficult to tell without more information.

It’s also possible—thought extremely unlikely—that everything I’ve experienced since early August of 1988 has been a dream, and soon I will awaken in the recovery room after my open heart surgery, thinking, “Damn it, I survived,” which is roughly what I thought when I first woke up from that surgery.  It was not a pleasant awakening; I was cortically blind for about a day (though I didn’t realize it at the time), I was (obviously) in quite a lot of pain, I had three chest tubes and a couple of central lines and an endotracheal tube inserted into me, and my hands were strapped to the bed rails.  I probably looked vaguely like something out of an H. R. Giger painting.

Anyway, the point is I feel really worn down this morning.  I almost wish that I hadn’t brought my laptop computer with me, because my backpack feels like it weighs twice as much as usual.  That’s an illusion, of course, but the experience is salient even if misleading.

I resaved this original file for yesterday’s blog post with a new name—not overwriting the original draft of yesterday’s post—in order to avoid having to start a new post with that (cr)Aptos font and change it to Calibri.  I wonder how many people like the new default font, how many people really don’t care, how many people, like me, dislike the new font, and how many people don’t mind it so much but don’t appreciate the whole “change for the sake of change” nonsense that motivates so much of the computer industry these days.

“All improvement is change, but not all change is an improvement,” as Eliezer Yudkowsky has said.  I could not agree more if I tried with both hands (which I am doing, at least while typing).  This is one of the reasons I hate political and related slogans in movements that simply talk about making “change”.  Change in general is easy enough to make.  If you ignite some thermite and napalm in the middle of a house, that will change the house.  For that matter, so will hitting the house with a tornado, or a large asteroid.

Does any environmental organization say, “Let’s work together to make real climate change”?  It would be slightly humorous, I suppose, but it would miss the point.

As an aside, the southbound train just pulled into the station across the way, and my computer automatically logged into its Wi-Fi and saved the draft of this post to my OneDrive, because apparently I’ve logged into that train’s Wi-Fi in the past and saved the link.  That’s pretty nifty, when you think about it.  Now it’s pulling out and soon I will lose that connection.

The ease of such things, and their automaticity, is quite remarkable and useful, though of course, it entails certain vulnerabilities as well.  Still, it’s fascinating just how well the nature of such codes as used in Wi-Fi signals allows them to transmit useful information with barely any connectivity.  This is the real difference between digital and analog signaling, and it’s one of the things that makes me want to study Information Theory more deeply.

I have an audio textbook (very basic) on information theory, but I don’t tend to listen to my audio books except during long walks, and I’ve fallen off that wagon a bit.  But still, Information Theory is really very cool.

If I were able to get good nights’ sleeps, if I were able to rest, I think I would be able to console myself with nothing more than learning about more of these really interesting subjects and having my own thoughts about them*.  As it is, though, I’m so tired and in pain and worn out that most days I just fantasize about going to sleep and never waking up.  It would be nice to have a better future than that, but there’s no good reason for me to expect it.

Meantime, I’ll keep writing this and, as I did yesterday, also write about a page a day of my new story until it’s done.  I hope each of you—and all of you collectively on average—feels better than I do today.  Come to think of it, if each of you feels better than I do, then your average, perforce, will be better than my level.  That’s trivial mathematics**.

*They’re not necessarily banal or unoriginal thoughts, either.  I predicted the tech stock bubble burst in the late nineties well in advance, I recognized an issue with LLMs and the like quite some time ago that was discussed in a Sabina Hossenfelder video yesterday, and I even had some ideas about the reversibility of time and the possibility of the big bang happening in both “directions” that I’ve discovered is similar to some real ideas from real physicists.  I’m not saying I had unique or remarkable or singular insights, but I don’t just passively take in stuff.  I build mental models—I don’t necessarily learn quickly, but I do learn deeply—and they can be useful, at least when I believe in myself.  In the nineties, I did not have the courage of my convictions, and I let a bank talk me into investing in a tech fund, despite my misgivings…and before very long, the fund had lost half its value.  Humility can be a false virtue sometimes.

** Incidentally, it’s possible in principle for 90% of people to be above average, but not for 90% of people to be above the median.  The median is defined, mathematically, as the midway point along an ordered list of ascending values in a group, so literally 50% of the members are at or above the median and 50% are at or below.  With the average—which usually refers to the arithmetic mean, in which one sums all the numbers of a group then divides the sum by the number of members of that group—one can have rare situations such as 90 of a hundred people getting a 51% on an exam and the remaining 10 getting 10%, which would give a mean score of 46, so that indeed, 90% of the test-takers would be above average.

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On months and writing and self versus other mastery, and other mental flotsam

Well, it’s Friday now, and it’s actually the first of the month, which would normally have been yesterday, but this is a leap year (and so, in the US, a presidential election year).

I really do think the days of the months as we have them now are stupidly erratic and irrational.  I think it would be more fun if we had 12 thirty-day-long months and then just, at the end of the year, a five-day-long festival, when most people are off work and we celebrate the passing of the winter solstice*, and the coming lengthening of daylight.  Then, on leap years, there could be an extra day to the festival, and that would be a joyful thing.

Oh, well.  I don’t think that’s likely to happen.  But it’s a nice thought, I guess.

I did manage to write a page of Extra Body yesterday, and it was a computer-written** page, so it was maybe four hundred to five hundred words.  It is a slight shame, but writing on the laptop computer is just much more natural for me (ironically), and it doesn’t exacerbate the soreness at the base of my thumbs like writing by hand.

Of course, writing this on my smartphone makes the base of my thumbs get a bit sore, too.  I should probably just do both things on the laptop computer if I’m going to keep doing them.  I communicate best by writing on the laptop computer, anyway, probably much better than I do by spoken word.  I don’t know.  Maybe not.

Anyway, I guess it’s a good thing that I wrote a bit of fiction yesterday.  And I mean to write a page today, and tomorrow as well, since I work tomorrow.  The story is going okay so far, and since it’s not a horror story, it shouldn’t get too dark, which is a relative rarity for my fiction.  Once I finish it, I guess I can see if I’m ready to write HELIOS.

I guess, given the state of my thumbs, I’ll write that whole thing on the laptop computer.  It is a shame to have to let the two new spiral-bound notebooks go to waste, but I don’t see any other reasonably available alternative.  I suppose it would be nice if I used them to practice calculus and linear algebra and physics problems and so on, and if I do such problems, I guess I will use it.  But it seems unlikely that I’ll find the gumption to do those things.

I have my science and math books out and around my desk:  Classical Electrodynamics, and Calculus, and Gravitation, and Euclidean Quantum Gravity, and Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible, and Spacetime and Geometry.

I would love to get through all of them, but my mental energy is sapped and drained by having to deal with all the nonsense of the human world.  Unfortunately, I have to make a living‒no one is offering to support me and provide my basic needs while I study up on my physics and mathematics.  Why would they?  People have a hard enough time having me around even when I’m paying my own way.

I’m so tired of the world.  It’s really just a bastion of idiocy and irrationality and dirt and unnecessary suffering.  And it’s not as though I’m some exception to that description.  I certainly don’t see myself as superior to the nonsense around me.  Maybe if I did, I would feel better, but it probably wouldn’t be good for the other people in my life, in the world.  I could all too easily see myself becoming a hyper ambitious villain of some variety.

Of course, the real reason I don’t see myself doing such a thing is that it would be irrational and illogical.  While there are surely people who are exceptionally gifted and creative and productive, it’s absurd to think that any one person is the greatest of all, or is destined to rule, or is “special” in some fundamental sense.

No matter how smart you are, there is always going to be someone out there who is smarter than you at least at some things.  If there were no such one alive right now‒and there almost certainly is such a one‒then there will be in the future or has been in the past.  Going beyond even that, in the space of all possible minds there are potential thinkers compared to which Einstein would be as an amoeba is to Einstein‒and more so.

Also, in the real world, all people who have ever achieved great “power” have only had it through and by the acquiescence or cooperation or loyalty or whatever of other people.  And any power “over others” that requires the consent or the cooperation of others is not any power at all.  It’s just a transient configuration in a complex and chaotic system.

There is a line in one of the “chapters” of the Tao te Ching that reads something along the lines of “mastering others is strength; mastering oneself is true power”.  It sounds very Stoic in nature, though I seriously doubt that Lao Tzu ever met a Stoic.  Still, the similarity is not a mere coincidence.  One of the hallmarks of true knowledge and understanding is that it will tend to be converged upon by disparate people as long as they are all legitimately and honestly seeking to understand the universe.

I would quibble with the first half of the quote, maybe; I’m not sure that mastering others really is even any kind of strength.  It can probably be useful, but it’s not going to give one much beyond transient benefits.  And it’s certainly questionable whether one ever does or can master others.

This is corollary to something I often tell a coworker who troubles himself all the time about “why” people in the office (or on the phone) say and do the things they do.  I point out to him that even the people themselves who say and do things rarely (if ever) know why they do and say what they do and say.  There’s no point in him trying to figure it out from his third person standpoint.

Just observe what people do and respond to it and adjust to it as best you can‒but don’t dwell on how it reflects on you or what you might have done to deserve it, or whatever.  Just try to let inconsequential things like insults or jokes at your expense wash over you, like the chattering of squirrels or the crowing of a rooster.  Try only to pay attention to useful things.

And, of course, the Tao to Ching is not wrong to encourage mastering oneself, as much as possible.  That’s more than enough challenge for a single lifetime, frankly, and I am far from convinced that anyone has ever truly succeeded.

I certainly know that I haven’t.

*Yes, this is northern hemisphere biased, but the majority of humans live in the northern hemisphere.  Five days off in the beginning of summer wouldn’t be so horrible for those in the south, anyway.  They could go to the beach, for one thing.

**Meaning I wrote it using a computer, not that a computer wrote it.  Then again, my mind is a form of computer, a universal Turing machine (or nearly so), but if I were approaching the matter that way, then any writing I do, even with pen on paper, is computer-written.

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I should take a flying Leap Day

Hello and good morning.

Happy February 29th.  This is a date that only comes approximately once every four years.  I say “approximately” because as I’ve noted before, on three of every four turns of centuries, there is no leap day.  This is because the length of a year is ever so slightly less than 365.25 days…though I don’t recall if that’s measured in solar days or sidereal days.

Anyway, I’ve gone over this ground often enough already‒too often, probably.  I won’t bore you with more of it for now.  Probably I’m the only one who really finds it interesting, anyway.

Yesterday was a miserable day overall, though I did start off somewhat productively, typing all of what I’d written so far of Extra Body into the laptop computer.  It was almost five handwritten pages, which turned out to be just shy of 1400 words.  That’s roughly how much I used to write on any given day when producing a draft of a new work of fiction.  Anyway, I didn’t write anything new after that yesterday , but at least it’s primed and hopefully I’ll do a page of new writing today, once I’m done with this.  I’m heading to the office early‒even for me‒to try to make sure I have plenty of time to get that started.

I ended up leaving the office really late last night, because now it turns out that even the two people I like most there are getting to be part of the group who is willing to roll over the guy who’s not capable of just shutting out and walking away from work and saying to Hell with people who don’t worry about how what they do affects others.

I was already really depressed and frazzled to start the day.  I even put ear plugs in and then wore my airport-style hearing protector muffs to block out the noise of the music and the people saying silly things.  Neither of the two measures works adequately on its own, but together they do a decent job.  However, the ear muffs give me a headache after a while, because they squeeze my head.

I should just sabotage the stupid sound system; unfortunately, it is both fixable and replaceable.

Sometimes I feel almost as if a collection of a few people in the office‒among them people I thought were my friends‒are trying to drive me to quit, or to kill myself, or perhaps just to lose it in some other way.  I know it’s pretty silly to think such things, but in some ways, it’s emotionally less horrible to think that people are deliberately out to cause me harm than to think that people about whom I care, and who I thought cared about me, are willing to cause me distress and pain just out of thoughtlessness and inconsideration.

I’m probably being oversensitive.  I’m probably actually just on the verge of seriously losing my mind.  That probably wouldn’t surprise anyone.

Anyway, I ended up getting back to the house quite late, and then‒because commuting is not inherently relaxing‒I was a bit wound up and had trouble getting to sleep, so I watched several videos of people “reacting” to songs that I know.  This can be kind of fun, to a limited degree, because it feels almost like listening to a song (or similarly, to watching a movie or show) with a friend who hasn’t seen it before, though there is no actual give and take.

It also doesn’t give you the experience of watching some new thing (or listening to some new song) that you yourself have never seen with a friend, because the YouTube videos can’t really embed an entire show or movie, without being taken down due to copyright.  One has to join Patreon groups to watch things like that, and I’m really only following two people on Patreon.

I joined one of the two to see reactions to Doctor Who, but they are now all caught up, and there won’t be new Doctor Who episodes until May, I think.  They react to other shows, most of which I haven’t watched, but unfortunately, most of those shows are ones in which I am not interested.

I might be interested in them if I truly, literally had someone with whom to watch them; I watched many shows with my (now-ex) wife that I probably wouldn’t have watched on my own, because she was interested in them, and it made me happy to enjoy them with her.  Also, of course, we had similar tastes in many things; there was, after all, a reason we got married.  Or, well, there was a whole set of reasons.  Just one probably wouldn’t have been an adequate incentive for either of us.

But I’m a tiresome person, even to people who honestly love me.  I can sympathize, since I find myself tiresome.  Maybe people at the office really would prefer me to be gone, but are too kind to allow themselves to think such thoughts in their conscious minds, but end up acting on them nevertheless.  I couldn’t blame them, really, for such a thing.  How can someone be blamed for their subconscious thoughts?

I should just take myself out of everybody’s way.  I don’t make other people happy in any kind of reliable sense, but I do make many other people unhappy, though I would prefer not to do so.  Since I’m a net negative on the world, any personal return to zero on my part would be a net gain for the world at large.  And after that, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.

Time will tell, I guess.  I’ll try to screw my courage to the sticking point and see if I can eventually succeed.  Well, actually, I will only see if I fail.  Only others will be able to see if I succeed.  That’s the nature of the thing, as far as I can tell, and is one of the most potent arguments against it, given I would be causing problems for which I could provide no possible assistance.

But since other people seem sanguine about inconveniencing me‒and it seems to be a general tendency among humans‒I shouldn’t let it be an absolute barrier to my choices, though I still think it should be a relative one.

Anyway, that’s that.  I hope to get a page written on Extra Body today, if I can.  I suppose, if you’re unlucky enough for me to be still around tomorrow and writing my blog, I’ll let you know.

TTFN

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My poisonous (or poisoned) thoughts

I’m disappointed to have to tell you all that I did not write any fiction yesterday.  I didn’t write any in the morning, having written a longish blog post.  Then, by relatively early in the workday, I had become mentally exhausted.

The “music” in the office doesn’t help, since it’s loud and basically unrelated to anything about what we do‒it’s just there for background noise, to dampen the sounds of other people on their phones, or to camouflage it, to break up its signature.  But also, it was just maddening to see again how slipshod and unreliable people are, how little they care about how what they do affects other people (or themselves).

Early in the day, a few minutes after our official starting time, I looked out at the office‒as the person who keeps track of who’s there and who isn’t and when people arrive and leave‒and could see that perhaps only half of the people in the office were there yet.  I noted this to my coworker, who grimly nodded with obvious resigned disapproval.  I told him, as if realizing it for the first time, that it really bothered me.  And it really does.  It’s both contemptuous and contemptible.

We long ago moved our starting time back an hour, nominally to make sure people could get to work on time more easily, since traffic in south Florida really can be terrible.  However, that did not change people’s lateness at all.  It made no discernible difference.

Unfortunately, people suffer no consequences for being late, so there is no incentive for anyone to do otherwise.  They are also not penalized for working over into lunchtime or past the official end of the day (it is often the people who arrive late who also stay late).  So, basically, I never get an adequate break time, since there’s no sensible way for me to go anywhere outside the office during lunch, and those who started break on time restart work on time, and so need support people to be available.

Anyway, it’s appalling that already, by Tuesday, I was simply mentally (and emotionally) exhausted.  And I know it’s not just the specifics of this job that wear me out.  If I were to do any job I’ve ever had in the past, I think I would be similarly worn out; the exact time until it happens might vary slightly, but I don’t think it would do so by all that much.

Even as early as high school, I used to get into these states in which I felt just completely empty, and would have been “happy” to stop, to end right there.  They didn’t happen as often, and I lasted longer between them‒that’s redundant, isn’t it‒and I think I recovered more quickly and easily.  But it went on into college and med school and residency and practice and all that has come after.

The medical work, though harder, was somewhat less enervating, because there were intellectual challenges and the ability to make a real difference for people, and there was a degree of respect.  Also, one was working with professionals at all levels, and that’s reassuring.

I was labeled with depression (then later also, and more generally, with dysthymia) fairly early, and certainly started having these feelings of wanting to die, and more specifically wanting to kill myself, at a young age.  Obviously, there’s some inherent degree of “typical” depression here, but I wonder how much of it might be due to undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder‒assuming that even applies to me, which I think it probably does.

I have no real capacity to seek out diagnosis or help for it or for anything else, frankly, so it’s hard to get any kind of “official” feedback.  Between a kind of learned helplessness from chronic internalized stress (and chronic pain), and my own social dysfunction and my ever-present self-hatred and self-destructive urges, it’s hard even to begin to take care of myself.

Actually, I don’t know if it’s the case that, fundamentally, I hate myself so much as that I hate my experience, my moment to moment interaction with reality.  It’s so often so very unpleasant.  At the very least, there is no single day that I can recall that didn’t include some significant moments of what one might call “spiritual revulsion”, a kind of nausea and stress about how unrational and unsane the world is, at least from my point of view‒and ultimately I have no other viewpoint from which to gaze upon reality.

I think my self hatred is a kind of rationalized conclusion combined with a sort of “halo effect”*.  If the world is so anathema to me, so much of the time, then I must just not be suited for this world.  So, I’m defective, or at least, I’m not the right organism for the job.

Also, since so much of life is persistently unpleasant, and since the single common variable in all aspects of that unpleasantness is me, then I cannot help but have residual disgust and hatred stain my image of myself; it accumulates over time until it’s thicker than a rhino’s hide and as disgusting as the slime of a hagfish.

I don’t know what I can do about it, unfortunately, other than either declare myself the enemy of the world and act accordingly or destroy myself.  Or, I suppose, I could do both.  No matter what, I don’t think I can go on much longer.  Then again, I’ve felt that way off and on for quite a long time.  But it’s becoming more frequent and more persistent‒the pulses are longer and closer together.

My reserves may be deeper than I would ever have expected them to be, but they cannot be infinite.  Certainly on the scale of the duration of the world, I must either lose my mind or destroy myself (or both) before much longer.

In the meantime, I’m going to have to do my fiction writing in some other way, if I do it.  I’ll need to do it earlier in the day, before the troglodytes start arriving and making their noise.  I may give up and use the laptop computer, because the handwriting is really exacerbating the soreness at the base of my thumb.  Maybe I’ll do it in the mornings after my blog post, or instead of it on some days.

I did fiddle with my guitar a little yesterday, so to speak, but that’s far less fruitful than writing, so maybe I’ll just give up on that.

Ultimately, I should probably just give up…period.  Until I do, I guess I’ll keep poisoning the Internet with these, my gloomy thoughts.  Enjoy!

*Perhaps “horns effect” might be a better term in this case.