life

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“Bright and early for the daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere…”

First of all, I would like to point out a bit of numerical fun we have regarding today’s day and date:  it’s November 11th, or 11-11.  That’s the case whether you’re using the US or the European date ordering system, since 11-11 is indistinguishable from 11-11.  It’s also Tuesday, and we have 2 of the same number with 2 of the same digits, which each add up to 2, so, two twos on Tuesday.  Fun!

Well, maybe things like that are only fun for me, but I have to try to entertain myself and find fun where I can; no one is gonna do it for me, that’s for sure.

Speaking of fun, what about this crazy weather?  I imagine it must be worse for the rest of the eastern US where this front or thing or what have you has had its effect, but it’s remarkable enough here in south Florida.

Yesterday, the high was 80F (I think that’s just under 27C‒or almost exactly 300K‒but I’m doing the figuring in my head while on the way to work, so I may be off), but now, this morning, it is 51F, and it is supposed to get lower before it starts warming up a little.  That’s a 29 degree drop (in Fahrenheit‒it’s roughly a 16 degree drop in Centigrade or Kelvin, which I guess would make the current temperature 11C or 284K) in about 12 hours.

This is one of the days I’m glad I’m not riding my “scooter”* anymore, because when you’re going over 70 on the highway and it’s 50ish degrees out, the effective wind chill is brutal.

For most of the US, especially up north, and for Canada, the weather down here is probably laughable.  Canadians would probably go swimming when it’s 50 degrees Fahrenheit (10C), and not in a heated pool, either, but in one of those cold Canadian lakes.  I grew up in Michigan, so I’m not far from that background, myself; I swam in cold lakes and rivers quite a few times in my youth.  But of course, I’ve now lived in Florida for quite some time‒more than 2 decades‒so I’ve gotten a bit soft.

Ugh.  I’m doing a blog post about the weather!  I was even about to talk about whether I prefer it hot or cold, and to give my reasons.  I’ll let you guess, if you’re so inclined, but I need to veer away from this subject.  It’s one thing to discuss the science of weather and climate‒those are interesting and very nifty and important subjects‒or the mathematics of weather prediction.  But merely to talk about the weather is just too sad.

I already expect it will be the “hot topic” (ha ha) at the office this morning.

There are, of course, good, sound, biological reasons for people to be concerned about the weather.  But that is not what I’ve been discussing, is it?  I’ve just been discussing it because it’s a little bit out of the ordinary, and it’s easy to talk about the weather.  That doesn’t make it particularly fun or engaging, though.  For instance, I never did quite grasp the opening lyrics to the Tears For Fears song, Head Over Heels:  “I wanted to be with you alone and talk about the weather.”

Presumably this is some manner of love song, and in it the protagonist wants to talk to someone‒I presume*** the object of his affections‒about the weather?  I’m almost sure there’s more to it; perhaps it’s an expression of how gripping the loved one’s company is, such that even talking about the weather with them is something worth seeking.  I have to think there was depth there (I don’t know the song well), because these are the guys who wrote Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and also Mad World (though my favorite version of that latter song is not theirs but the cover done for the movie Donnie Darko).

I guess in some ways I am too literal-minded, but I do try to catch myself at it and make it into a joke when I can, which often works very well.

Speaking of literal jokes, here’s a little one I posted on Threads and Facebook and the website formerly known as Twitter yesterday.

I made the joke up on Sunday, when I walked past a (now-abandoned) furniture store which still had a sign out front like the one in my joke.  If you know me, you’ll understand why this joke occurred to me at that time.

That’s enough gibberish for now, I guess.  I’m certainly past 701 words.  I hope you all have as good a day as you could hope to have (even if it’s not necessarily as good as you could wish to have).  Stay warm, my friends.

*I used “scare quotes”** because it was a 650cc scooter, so basically it was a full-on motorcycle, just with continuously variable transmission.

**It wasn’t strictly necessary, but I couldn’t resist putting scare quotes around the term “scare quotes”.

***Though one must be careful.  As we all know, when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me, and that’s not as good a thing as it might have been in the past.

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“I turn the trouble of my countenance merely upon myself.”

I would like to apologize to anyone who was worried about me* on Saturday (and possibly through the rest of the weekend) because I did not post on that day.  One of our two weekend closers was unable to make it in because of serious personal things happening, and our newest fronter‒the only remaining active one‒also could not make it.  If we had opened the office, there would have been very little to accomplish, so the office did not open.

Thus, I had the weekend “off”, for whatever that’s worth.  I was at least able to get some rest and to get some walking in (trying to be careful not to overdo it).  It was all very boring, though.

I’ve chewed up and digested (and passed) a lot of the things that I do for distraction, like YouTube videos, and the Algorithm** cannot seem to grasp my desires and interests as well as it used to do.  It’s quite frustrating at times.  But I suspect the fault lies not in my algorithms but in myself.  I am running out of capacity to divert myself adequately.  To quote the Pink Floyd song One of My Turns, “nothing is very much fun anymore.”

It shouldn’t be so, of course (though what “should” be anything is quite debatable).  I have oodles of books in my Kindle and even a fair few “real” books.  I have a stack of science books above my desk including Spacetime and Geometry by Sean Carroll, and the whole “Theoretical Minimum” series by Leonard Susskind et al, and Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible by Anthony Zee, and even a text coauthored by Stephen Hawking called Euclidean Quantum Gravity.

These are all books I chose and in which I have real, serious interest, but I cannot seem to muster the focus to take them down and read them during breaks and down time.  I could even be using my membership to Brilliant to review things and to learn new things‒it’s a lovely service/site/app.  I also have a lifetime membership to Babbel that was surprisingly cheap, which I have hardly used at all.

This is all stuff in which I am seriously interested; no one is asking me to study this material, let alone making me do it.  But I cannot seem to focus on any of it.

I guess I’ve always done better, academically, when I was in a formal program, with quizzes and tests and discussions and so on.  But even in those situations, I often got distracted and sometimes had to forbid myself to do anything but classwork during the week.  Even then, my approach was never typical.

My ex-wife used to say that I was the only medical student she knew that never studied but still passed everything.  Now, that was a serious exaggeration; I studied in my way, but not when she was around.  Also, how many medical students had she known other than me?

Still, I don’t and didn’t study the way other people seem to tend to study.  I don’t memorize things, generally.  I make a sort of model or mechanism of the subject in my head, putting the pieces together, and though this might make me slower to learn initially, it keeps the knowledge in my head, because it’s not rote memorization, it’s more of a system or a construct.  I have a kind of picture or shape or edifice, and if I “look at it”, the answers are almost implicit.

It sounds sexier than it is, probably.

In any case, I’m fortunate that I can learn that way, because cranking through things has always been…well, not quite anathema to me, but I do have a hard time.

According to what I have read, between 30% and 70% of people with autism spectrum disorder also have diagnosable ADHD.  Now, I don’t know whether this might be behind some issues for me, but my studying, though relatively successful for me in the past, has never been very sensible.

For instance, the one thing common to pretty much all my notebooks in undergrad and in med school is that nearly every page was packed, not with notes from whatever the lecture was, but with doodles of varying kinds, some quite intricate.

Many of these doodles were dark (it’s me, after all) but there were also a lot of whimsical things.  For instance, in a lecture in anatomy class that included descriptions of the lactiferous duct, I drew an elaborate cartoon of a “lactiferous duck” which was a caricature of a mallard swimming along with a bottle of milk slung around its neck in the fashion of the stereotypical rescue Saint Bernard’s bottle of booze.

My friend Chivano thought it was pretty funny.  He was sitting next to me while I drew it.

Well…this has been a weird blog post, has it not?  And I’ve passed the 701 word target, so it’s time to draw this weirdness to a close.  Also, I’m not really interested in writing more at the moment.  It, like everything else, is in a superposition of boring and irritating.  It probably gets that from me.

I hope you all have a good day and a good week, and so on, and so on, and so on…

*See, I still occasionally write some fiction.

**As if there were only one.

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Unless you work with leather, awl is vanity

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m writing this on my smartphone again today.  Though writing on my lapcom was definitely better and more fun, I just didn’t have the will to bring it with me at the end of the day.

I had a bad day depression-wise yesterday, and I feel that it had a somewhat contagious effect on the office, though I tried to keep it to myself.  The trouble is, I guess the general negative feeling and my near-catatonia can be felt, in a way, by the others in the office.

Anyway, enough about that.  I’m trying to avoid talking about the dysthymia/depression stuff and its associated thoughts and emotions.  It just serves to bum other people out, it doesn’t seem to help me in and of itself.  It certainly hasn’t led to anyone coming and rescuing me, despite my past open cries for help.  People are far more likely to come to me asking for help with their own issues than to try to help me.

That’s probably my own doing, really.  I mean, I’m a doctor (though I am no longer allowed by the esteemed and wise and intelligent government of Florida to practice medicine).  I’ve always tried to be of benefit, to earn my continued existence and to earn other people’s affection and/or company by being useful.

The trouble with that is that people will tend to drop you like a ninety pound cockroach once you’re no longer useful, or if you become inconvenient.  And yet, in contrast, many selfish dotards‒like the present dotard-in-chief‒will garner loyal followers who get abused and lied to and taken advantage of in every nasty way, only to respond with a (metaphorical), “Thank you, sir, may I have another?”

Humans are so very stupid, but plainly, so am I.

I should be working tomorrow, so I will write another post then, assuming nothing catastrophic (or dogastrophic) happens between now and then.  Does that statement entail a promise or is it a threat?  That’s very much up to the person receiving the message, but as for my intention, it’s just to inform you.

Oh, hey, maybe some of you might know the answer to my following bit of curiosity.  During the latter part of last week, my blog abruptly spiked in readership, peaking at more than 10 times my usual number of visits and views.  This is still nothing about which to write home*, but it’s quite startling.  Now, it’s sliding back to more normal numbers, which I guess is just regression to the mean, but I am basically curious as to why so many new people (apparently) came to read my blog at the end of last week and into the very early part of this one.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but when I saw that initial little spike begin and then persist and increase for a few days, I wondered whether maybe I had suddenly found a bigger audience, and maybe my writing situation was going to change thereby.  Obviously, though, that’s not what happened.  That’s fine; I didn’t really expect it to be that way, I just had a little frisson of “ooh, what if…”

I did get an “official” check mark on Twitter not long ago, just to try to improve my reach, and I wonder if that had anything to do with my brief readership bump.  I was about to get the same “official check mark” through the Meta based platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) as well, but I am going to wait a bit just because of the added expense.  I don’t know why, exactly, since I have nothing better to do, and I honestly like Threads better than the website formerly known as Twitter, and more people whom I actually know are on Facebook.

Oh, well, it’s not the first time I’ve been unable to explain my actions in a purely rational way.  That’s par for the universe, though; there are always causes, for everything, but there are only very rarely reasons.  Telos is a human-invented concept, like justice, like money, and like so many other things people take so seriously.

I guess I can’t complain too much about people taking justice seriously.  While there are unending struggles to determine just what justice is‒I always say that true justice must be based on compassion, for how can you possibly judge someone’s actions without knowing as much about what led to them as possible‒it’s hard to make a good, honest case that justice is unimportant, at least within human civilization.

[Weird aside:  the thought just popped into my head that someone should write an anti-Wuthering Heights story and call it Withering Depths.  I don’t know why I thought that; I’ve never even read Wuthering Heights nor seen any production of it other than the semaphore version by Monty Python’s Flying Circus.]

Okay, well, that’s enough for now.  If any of you accidentally boosted my readership last week, I would just like to say “Thank you.”  So here it is:  Thank you.

May I have another?

*I don’t have a home to which to write, anyway, nor anyone to whom to send such a homeward-bound missive should I write one.

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For ’tis your thoughts that now must blog our kings

Hello and good morning.  It’s the first Thursday in November today—it has to be so, since it’s the 6th, and there are only 7 days in a week, so there could not have been a prior Thursday in November, there being no “negative numbered days”.  QED*.

I’m writing today’s post on my mini lapcom, as I call it, which I decided to bring with me to the house yesterday, just in case.  Possibly I was persuaded by my discussion in yesterday’s post about the prospect of writing and writing and writing, on some future day, to see how long I could just keep writing off the cuff, impromptu, without a script and without an agenda, with only bathroom (and food) breaks.

I realized that was not something I would ever want to do on my smartphone.  Not that it couldn’t be done, it just wouldn’t be as much fun.  Also, I think the bases of my thumbs would probably swell up to twice their baseline size if I did that, and I might never be able to use them again.

I don’t know what subject or subjects to address on this first Thursday post of November in 2025 (AD or CE, whichever you prefer), but that didn’t stop me from writing nearly two hundred words before even beginning this paragraph.  I guess maybe this is how most casual conversations go, isn’t it?  People just sort of start talking and see what comes out of their own mouths and the mouths of their interlocutor(s).

I suspect that, a decent portion of the time, most people in a conversation are only slightly more “surprised”** by what another person says than they are about what they say themselves.  We don’t tend to think ahead before we speak, at least not in most interactions; we hear our own thoughts even as we’re enunciating them.

So it is with my writing—at least my nonfiction (though my fiction very much also just happens).  I rarely know ahead of time what the next word will be.  I certainly don’t know more than a word or two in advance, unless I’m really focused on making some specific point that’s going to require specific words.

I guess it’s not entirely unlike the way LLMs produce words and so on.  They don’t exactly plan it out ahead of time.  The various weights in the network interact in whatever way they do, which has been influenced by their “training”, and they come out with the next word and the next.  They don’t really have any clearer, linear, step-by-step processes that they would understand (in detail) themselves.

That’s not to say they couldn’t in principle know the weight values of their nodes (I think that’s the term usually used), and could literally copy those weights into other places to run an AI that starts off identical to the original—it’s much easier for software to do this than for wetware like human brains/minds.  But they couldn’t discern and work out the logic, the steps, the process in detail of how and why they work they way they do specifically.

This is the good ol’ Elessar’s Conjecture (which I suspect is a law, or else I wouldn’t conject it):  No mind can ever fully and completely understand itself, because each data processing unit, be it neuron or a transistor or whatever, does not have the information processing power to describe itself, let alone its interaction with the rest of the network of which it is a part.

Intelligence cannot ever be a simple process, I’m very nearly certain of that.  And nonlinear, neural network style “programs” are not simpler just because we can grow them far more easily than we can write out the program for an actual AI.  We don’t know how they work—not in detail, sometimes barely even in vague terms.  They just “grow” if we follow certain steps.

But you can grow a plant in a similar fashion.  Heck, you can grow a new human if you follow a few relatively simple and often not unpleasant*** steps.  But could you “write” a human?  Could you design and them build one, biochemistry to brain and all?

If you can honestly and correctly answer “yes” to that question, what the hell are you doing reading this?  We need you out there solving all the world’s problems!  Maybe you are, though.  I could hardly expect to know better than you what actions you should take if you are such an incredible mind.  Maybe you know exactly what you’re doing.

I doubt it, though.

Nevertheless, perhaps we only truly understand something when we can actually design and build it, piece by piece.  We do not understand our AIs.  What’s more, they do not understand themselves, any more than you and I understand ourselves in detail (though I think we’re currently better at that than AIs, but we’ve had a lot more practice).

Okay, well, I passed 701 words just a moment ago, so I’ll bring this post to a close, having once again meandered into surprising territory, though I hope it’s at least mildly interesting and thought provoking.  I’ll just close with the notion that, perhaps, if one wishes to take drastic, revolutionary action to save the world from great crisis, one should not act against specific human political leaders and the like, but one should rather sabotage server farms and related parts of computer infrastructure.  It is relatively fragile.

I’m not saying I recommend this, I’m just…thinking “out loud” on a keyboard.

TTFN

*That’s the old quod erat demonstrandum, not quantum electrodynamics, though kudos indeed to the Physics community for making one of the best science acronyms ever in QED.

**By which I don’t mean “startled” in any sense, though that can happen.  I just mean that one doesn’t know ahead of time and so one’s own speech is as much a revelation to one’s consciousness as is that of others.

***For good, sound, biological reasons:  Creatures that enjoy sex are far more likely to leave offspring than those that do not, so over time, such creatures will tend to comprise the vast majority of any population that reproduces sexually.

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Do you remember a Guy that’s been in such an early song?

It’s Guy Fawkes Day in the UK‒also known as Bonfire Night if I’m not mistaken.  “Remember, remember, the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason, and plot…” and all that.  The holiday isn’t celebrated in the US, which is not surprising, since it has to do with a failed attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605, before the future United States was seriously being colonized, let alone officially founded.

Of course, it’s still a good day for civil resistance (though perhaps without the explosives).  It might be a good day for some group to slip powerful laxatives into the food of many, if not all, of the members of the current administration and many of the members of Congress and the Senate and even the Supreme Court.  Our national government could certainly use a serious colon cleanse, metaphorically speaking; it might be amusing for that to become literal*.

I’m not actually endorsing that action or encouraging it, but it’s a rather entertaining thought.

I’m very tired today, even though we’re just coming into the middle of the week.  Of course, I’m almost always tired but very rarely sleepy, which is not a great combination.  I suppose someone who never gets a full night’s sleep does, in a certain sense, live more than someone who sleeps well.  If, say, a person can only sleep 4 hours a night instead of 8, then after 60 years, they will have been awake for the equivalent of another person’s 75 years, if my math is right, and ceteris paribus.

But all other things are very much not equal when one has chronic insomnia.  The early part of Fight Club gives some pretty good descriptions of how insomnia can feel.  I particularly like the line, “…everything is a copy of a copy of a copy…” which does give something of an idea of the feeling of never getting enough sleep.

So the tradeoff would seem to be, in a sense, living more but worse versus living less but better.  But that still doesn’t quite capture matters, because chronic insomnia also increases the occurrence of many chronic and even acute illnesses, thus likely shortening the insomniac’s life relative to good sleepers’ lives.  One’s immune system tends to suffer, for one thing, which not only affects one’s risk of infection but also of cancer.  In addition, one’s metabolism gets thrown askew, probably partly due to chronically elevated stress hormones.

Of course, some of these effects might actually be causes, mightn’t they be?  Chronically elevated stress hormones can, by more than one route, reduce one’s sleep quantity and quality, for instance.  That’s one of the tricky things about the biology of multicellular organisms.  Many questions become “chicken and egg” problems.

Though, the actual question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” is one to which the answer is glaringly obvious.  Eggs have existed, in some form at least, since before backbones happened (paleontologists, please correct me if I’m wrong about that specific ordering).

Even if we focus only on hard-shelled eggs, like those of the proverbial chicken, these date back to the earliest fully land-based vertebrates, which if memory serves showed up at least a few hundred million years ago.  Chickens have only really been around, certainly in their modern form, since no farther back than the dawn of agriculture, say about 10,000 years ago.

These numbers are ballpark figures that I’m pulling out of my…memory.  If I’m off by a significant amount on any of them‒certainly by an order of magnitude or more‒please let me know.

Okay, well, I don’t know what else to write about this morning.  I mean, I could probably nevertheless keep writing indefinitely, pulling various weirdnesses out of my…store room.  But I won’t.

It might be fun to set that challenge for myself some day:  to see how long I can write at one sitting, with only bathroom breaks, and then just share the result on this blog without serious editing.  I think I would want to use the lapcom for such a task, or something similar with a real keyboard, rather than writing on my smartphone as I’ve been doing for most of my posts.

I wonder if there’s any Guinness World Records type entry on something like that.  Not that I’m into trying to make or break world records, but it’s amusing to contemplate.

Maybe someday I’ll do something like that, though I would need some manner of support to do it.  But it probably won’t happen very soon, if it happens.  It will probably have to wait until after I’ve caught the flying pig back from my skiing trip in Hell.

And I don’t know how to ski.

Well, that’s enough for today, I think.  I’ve passed 701 words, and like Major Tom after he passed 100,000 miles, I’m feeling very still.  I wish my spaceship knew which way to go.

But we can’t necessarily trust the good astronaut’s judgment on such matters, for as Bowie said later, in Ashes to Ashes, “We know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out in Heaven’s high, hitting an all time low.”

Hopefully, you all have a much better day than Major Tom.

*The Dulcolax™ treason and plot, you might say.

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Mon Dieu, it’s Mon day

Well, it’s Monday again and here I go again…on my own…going down the only road I’ve ever known.  Like a drifter, I was born to wear cologne*.

Anyway, I’m starting a new blog post at the beginning of a new work week, and the number of words in the footnotes is already significantly larger than the number here in the “main body” of the post.  That’s not all that unusual for me, but it is probably above the mean by at least a standard deviation.  I don’t see any practical way to check that, though, and I certainly don’t have enough interest to try to figure out such a way.  If any readers want to figure it out and share their results, please feel free to share them (but not with me).

I wonder if I’ve ever written a blog post in which the number of words in the footnotes is larger overall than the number of words in the main body.  It’s not impossible.  I wouldn’t be surprised either way, honestly.  But I’m not going to check.  You guys can if you want, and you should definitely share the results if you do (but again, not with me***).

[Quick aside‒I just thought of a spoof term, “Alexathymia”:  a condition that occurs when a person is so ensnared by the internet, web, and social media, that they need to ask their “digital assistant” how they feel (or should feel) about some product or issue or person.]

I’m sorry, I know this is a fairly strange sequence of thoughts to convey in a beginning-of-the-week blog post, even for me.  At least it feels that way from the inside.  I guess that’s one of the perks and the drawbacks of not having an agenda when one starts writing a post.  It can go anywhere (yay!), but also, well…it can go anywhere (ugh!).

Still, however erratic or hard to follow or annoying my writing here is, it’s at least better than me writing about all the negative thoughts and feelings that run through my poor excuse for a mind.  I hope it’s better.  If my dark, crumbly center is the best of me, well, I’m not sure what to make of that.  Probably, I would just make a mess.

However jerkily erratic my writing might be this morning, at least I’m sticking with my new word count “goal” of 701, so hopefully I won’t bore you for too long with my weirdnesses.  Also, I hope I won’t bore you with my banalities.  To be too unremarkable or to be too unusual are both negative things; you can tell by the use of the word “too”, which in this case refers to detrimental excess (though it can also mean “also”, but that wouldn’t make much sense here).

As for anything else, well…I guess this is the first full week of the new month, November****.  We also had the daylight savings time flip over this weekend here in the US, the one where we “fall back”, i.e., we set all clocks back an hour.  I’m never sure whether this constitutes the start or the stop of “Daylight Savings Time”, but it really doesn’t matter, so I don’t waste any time trying to memorize it.

It’s a strange thing, this hour shift, and it can throw one’s circadian rhythms off a bit, which is troubling if one is subject to seasonal affective problems, which I am.  It’s particularly annoying for nightfall to come suddenly much sooner than it did the day before.  I know that the nighttime grows longer during the time between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice anyway, but it’s easier to stomach without the sudden jump.

In college, though, I liked getting that extra hour on one weekend in the autumn, though I rued its reverse in the spring.  Mind you, I suspect it had little actual impact, but the psychological reward/punishment effect on my affect was not to be entirely dismissed.

And, with that, I think I’ll draw this fairly disjointed blog post to a close and put it out of your misery, if not its own.  Thank you for joining me here in the month of November.  I say “here” as if it referred to a place rather than a time (or a range of time, though we rarely refer only to dimensionless points when we refer to places in space, so I guess that’s okay).  ANYWAY, I hope you all have a week this week that is better than the last was, and that this trend continues, even if only in the most gradual fashion, for the rest of your lives.

*That’s a Mondegreen‒a misheard lyric‒from the song Here I Go Again by Whitesnake (which I thought came out much later in the ‘80s than it actually did, which was 1982).  Well, the last sentence was a Mondegreen**, the previous ones were accurate.

**Though I often do wear cologne, because I like having a pleasant odor.  But I’m not wearing any today, and I certainly was not born to do so.

***Okay, I’m trying to be funny and to seem coolly uninterested, but I would hate for someone to figure those things out and yet not share them with me, so please do share it if you gather that data.

****“November” almost seems like it might mean “new” something…a new ember perhaps, the first cast-off remnant of a dying fire symbolizing the fading of the year.  But, of course, the Nov- here refers to the number nine rather than to newness, as in “nova”*****.

*****Of course, in Spanish, nova could mean “no go”, as in, “it doesn’t go”, which partly explains why the Chevrolet Nova didn’t sell that well in Latin America.

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Words about fear and words about words

Well, it’s Saturday again, and for the second week in a row, I am writing a blog post.  I warned you that I probably would:  here, go take a look.  See?  I told you.

Of course, a blog post means I’m going to the office today.  It’s not a full day, but it chews up so much of the middle part that there’s no possibility of getting any extra rest, at least not for me.  For instance, I have awakened well before I would need to go to the office, but my anxiety or tension or whatever it might best be called does not let me sleep‒for fear of oversleeping, I guess.  It’s some manner of fear, anyway.  It’s not a fear of physical attack (I think) but it sort of feels like I have to watch my back, as though someone or something is out to get me.

Fear is not the mind killer, of course, despite the popular mantra from Dune.  Fear (up to a point) can sharpen the mind, if it’s not resisted inappropriately.  I think the 12th Doctor’s take on being scared is far better than that from Dune.  See below:

–

Obviously, too much fear is bad, but as Stephen Fry, playing the unscrupulous tobacconist points out (starting at roughly the 2:45 point here), that’s what the term too much means.

Too much of anything, more or less by definition, is bad.  This is one of those somewhat rare circumstances in which one can say “by definition” and not be relaying a merely semantic point without substance.

This is in contrast to the silly old conundrum “If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound?”  If you simply define your terms precisely, there is not going to be any ambiguity in the answer‒but you have to choose your “definitions”* of each word clearly, especially ones like “hear” and “sound”.

If you’re ever arguing about something (other than etymology and/or usage and/or diction) and you want to go to the dictionary to settle it, then you’ve probably been arguing about something without substance‒arguing past each other, as they say.  I’ve heard such arguments, even between people with seemingly above-average intelligence.

Of course, if they’re arguing for fun, as a sort of mental sport and exercise, and if they both (or all) are enjoying the process, then I have no trouble with it.  It probably sharpens their thinking skills, as long as they don’t let themselves forget that they’re just arguing over misaligned coding and the logical implications thereof.  Even a skilled martial artist who trains purely for exhibitions may be in real trouble in a street fight against serious opponents.

But even the OED doesn’t decide or define what English words mean; it records what words have been used to mean, their origins, their etymology, all that good, interesting stuff.

How did I get on this subject?  I guess I’ll see as I do the editing.  I certainly do bounce and meander in my head, don’t I?  And that process is often inextricably intertwined with writing.

That can be a good thing, sometimes, I suppose.  I would think it’s at least related to the nature of creativity.  But it’s also important to be able to focus and stay on point, to be disciplined, if one is truly to create anything of depth.  One of my biggest problems in the past was that I would come up with, for instance, good story ideas, but I would soon get distracted by some new story idea and get diverted from the first.

One of the best things about having been to prison‒yeah, there were a few good things, though they were strongly overwhelmed by the bad‒was that I was in a situation in which I could discipline myself to write every morning, when lights came on (about 3 am) for 3 to 4 pages, and not go on to a new story until I finished the first.  I mailed the pages out to my Mom, Dad, and sister as I went along, after rewriting them for a bit of legibility**.

In this fashion, I wrote first Mark Red, then CatC, then Paradox City.  Then, after I got out, I continued writing, finishing one story before starting the next, right up until I began Outlaw’s Mind.  That was the last story I started in that pattern, though I’ve since written a bit on The Dark Fairy and the Desperado and even less on HELIOS.

Currently, I just write this every work day.  I cannot explain why in any quick and simple fashion, but it is what it is, as the tautology goes.

I hope you have a good day.  I should be back on Monday.

*I put that in scare quotes because in nearly all cases, words don’t have real, singular, exclusive definitions, but instead have usages.  Now, as the person who coined various words in, for instance, The Chasm and the Collision, I can actually and literally define those words.  I have actual authority over those words; I created those words and I created those worlds.

**I kept my first draft so I would be able to go back and check things if I needed to do so.

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It’s a prime day for a (slightly) shorter blog post

Morning has broken!

Does anyone out there know a good, reasonably priced morning repair service or person?  I really don’t have the money or time to go pick out and buy a new morning.

Ha ha.

Sorry.  I know that’s quite a stupid joke.  Still, it should give you some idea just how tired I am.

I should have been able to get a decent sleep last night, but I did not.  That shouldn’t be anything new to me, but some days the effects of the insomnia seem to pile up far more than on some other days.  And today is one of those “pile up” days, it seems.

Thus, I intend to make this a relatively short blog post today if I can.  To that end, I’m setting my “target” number of words to be 701 instead of the usual 800*.  701 has the added advantage of being a prime number, which always makes things at least a little bit better from my point of view.

It’s funny how, as numbers get bigger, there seem to be fewer primes (they fall off as something like the natural log of the number range at which you’re looking, if memory serves).  And yet, there are an infinite number of them‒the same “countable infinity” as the natural numbers, “aleph nought”:

Also, we have the twin primes conjecture‒which apparently most mathematicians think is correct‒that there are an infinite number of primes that are with 2 of each other.

It has apparently been proven that there are an infinite number of primes separated by no more than about 500 or some such (it’s probably a lower separation now, but I haven’t looked into it in a while).  That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, but remember, we’re talking infinity here.  No matter how big the numbers get** you will never stop finding new sets of prime numbers that are no more than about 500 apart.

That’s not particularly useful to anyone but number theorists, I suppose, but it seems very interesting to me.

Incidentally, 701 is not part of a pair of twin primes, since 703 is not prime (it has four factors) and 699 is obviously divisible by 3.  And of course there is only one even prime (the number 2) because all other even numbers are divisible by 2.

Sorry, I know many people find these things boring, but I’m a fan of prime numbers.  In any case I’m trying not to be so negative in my blog posts, since I think it bothers a lot of people and may even be contagious at times.

It certainly doesn’t appear to do me any more good than does being a voice crying out in the wilderness, so to speak.  And despite the excellent biblical reference***, voices crying out in the wilderness usually are not heard or received by anyone or anything that can even understand them, let alone offer them any help.

I guess I can still talk about “imaginary” and complex numbers, because they just involve the square roots of negatives, but are not necessarily negative themselves****.  As long as I avoid multiplying them together, I should be able to steer relatively clear of negativity.

Ha ha, again.

I’m trying to try to avoid making other people miserable by expressing my own dark thoughts, so instead it seems I will make others miserable with my bad jokes.  You’re welcome.

Thinking about complex numbers makes me start feeling like I want to learn more about quaternions and spinors and so on, which seem truly fascinating, but about which I have only highly superficial knowledge.

It would be nice to learn more about them.  I probably will not, knowing me and my fatigued and distractible mind, but at least I can maybe be on the lookout for Numberphile videos about related subjects.  There’s at least one YouTube channel with a series on spinors.  Unfortunately, PBS Infinite Series stopped making new videos some time ago, but at least PBS Spacetime is still going strong, as are all of Brady Haran’s excellent channels.

And now, I’m over 701 (in the first draft), and so I’m done (for today at least).  I hope you all have a good day, and that your subsequent good days scale as the number of days, not as any logarithm thereof.

*I almost always go over my target, but at least it gives me a noteworthy place to decide it’s “time to wrap this up”.

**And there are described numbers so large that if you could memorize every digit of them, the information would be so concentrated as to turn your head into a black hole.

***It’s from the book of Isaiah.  John the Baptist supposedly quoted it and referred to himself as that voice, but then again, a lot of the writers of the “New Testament” shoehorned in references to supposed prophecy in the “Old Testament” to make the whole thing seem more sexy-cool (I guess).

****I just have to try to keep to the right upper quadrant of the complex plane.

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“They tumble blindly as they make their way…”

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m beginning the process of making my way to the office.  By the time I finish writing this, and certainly by the time it’s posted, I will be there.

I thought I might stay out sick today, because yesterday at the office I felt pretty crummy and almost as if I had a fever.  I checked, and my temperature was normal, but that’s hard to interpret, because I almost never don’t have NSAIDS and other analgesic/antipyretics on board*.  So I could pretty easily have something brewing that would cause a fever, but my fever response is too suppressed.

That’s not an ideal situation, I know, but the alternative is to try to ignore the chronic pain I have.  That’s not so easy, for good, sound, biological reasons.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, and with the proper motivation I could probably do it, but I have no such motivation.

What would I be trying to achieve by not treating my pain as best I can?  Increased longevity?  Hah!  What would be the point of that?  This life that I have is not really something worth prolonging.

If one has a delicious meal one may want to eat slowly, to relish** it.  If one is spending time with a good friend or spouse or other beloved family member, certainly that’s worth making things last as long as one reasonably can do.  But even people who consider themselves masochists don’t really want to prolong their own suffering.  They tend only to want the pain that gets them excited, which is not really “suffering” as most people would think of it.  In any case, I am no masochist; my inclinations are, if anything, in the opposite direction.

I don’t mean to imply that my own suffering is particularly odious or anything.  I’m sure there are many people who suffer much more than I do.  Some of them have to suffer with being moral and intellectual imbeciles, and that’s pretty horrifying to contemplate; many such people are involved in government, even though these are probably the last people one would reasonably want to have the job of keeping the machinery of the state functioning.

I mean, we can all see how badly that works, though some are deluded enough that they would claim not to know whereof I speak.  Still, what are you going to do?  Force the more competent, moral, disciplined, intellectually humble but rigorous people to be governors and legislators and administrators?  What if they got really pissed off about it and decided just to wreck everything as much as they could because they’ve been forced to work in positions of governance?

You think things are bad now?  Beware the wrath of smart, patient, disciplined, creative people.

Anyway, that’s just a tangential thought, something in which I seem to specialize, though it is not deliberate.  I just tend to let my thoughts meander***.

Speaking of which, yesterday, in recognition of that tendency, I titled my post by paraphrasing the catchphrase of the old cartoon character Ricochet Rabbit.  Since then, I had a related memory pop up of the old toy “Ricochet Racers”.  I never actually owned one of those, but I can vaguely recall the jingle that went with their ads:  “Ricochet Racers on target!  Have a real play [or was it a great play?] with a ricochet.”  Something like that.  That second line may be slightly off, but it gets the gist.

I wish I could convey the tune in writing.  Instead, here’s a video with a later version of the toy, and the guy sings a bit of the original theme, but with a changed second line.  He’s not a great singer, though, and these aren’t exactly the original words.

Thinking about it, I realize that the rhythm of that jingle is at least a little bit interesting.  The song appears to be in some version of 4/4 time, but the first line is sung in a set of slow-ish triplets, each triplet being equivalent to 4 quarter notes.  That’s mildly impressive for a jingle written to sell a long-defunct kids’ toy.

I wonder how many truly skilled composers end up doing such less-than-glorified work because they’ve got to make a living somehow.

We know that many movie composers are truly brilliant, from John Williams and Hans Zimmer through to people who primarily work in other genres but sometimes do films, such as Jonny Greenwood.  But those are large scale, respectable composing jobs.  What of the could-be Mozart who must write songs for McDonalds commercials?

I guess if such a person finds joy and satisfaction in that work, then there’s nothing to lament****.  Perhaps they can do enough composing to make a living that way, and otherwise compose things of their own in their spare time, which might one day be played by fancier musicians for more high-falutin’ purposes.  That seems okay, too.

That might be analogous to what I do here, except that none of my writing makes me any money at all, so it’s a bit less rewarding.  Still, if anyone reading wants to send me money, we could probably figure out a way to do it.

I won’t hold my breath.  But, whatever.  I hope at least some of you, some of the time, enjoy my posts.  And heck, if you like them, you could certainly share them, if you can think about someone who might be interested in reading them.

Here, I wrote a song about such liking and sharing.  It’s no “Ricochet Racers” theme, but I think it’s pretty good.

Have a nice day.

*That means “in my system”, in typical medical jargon, in case that wasn’t clear.  It probably was clear, though, wasn’t it?

**Or whatever garnish or condiment one might like on one’s food.

***Like a restless wind inside a letter box, if you will.

****Imagine a lament for a writer of jingles.  Rather “meta” isn’t it?

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Bing-bing-bing! Ricochet Robert.

I’m in a rather unusually bad amount of pain this morning, even for me, so please excuse me if my thoughts are somewhat incoherent or distracted or grumpy-seeming.  Though I don’t know how you would be able to tell if I’m grumpier than usual.

It’s Monday yet again, and it’s only been two days since my last post, not three, because I worked on Saturday, and on that day, I also wrote a very angry blog post.  I think some people might have found the degree of malice I expressed on Saturday disquieting or at least just not good, which I can understand.  I tend to think of such terrible things a lot more often than most people do (though I share them only infrequently); it’s one of the reasons I find my own company unpleasant.

But, of course, I’ve tried to compensate for my dark tendencies by doing as much good in the world as I’ve been able to do, such as by becoming a doctor.  I’ve never actually acted on any of my darkest impulses and dreams, except when I write horror stories, or when I write non-horror stories with horrible elements in them.

I guess maybe that’s one of the things that’s been therapeutic for me about writing fiction.  Maybe the trouble is right now that I don’t have a good outlet for my terrible thoughts.

Of course, I know that the idea of thoughts and emotions as “substances”, as if some manner of fluids, which can build up and need release is not merely incorrect, but is not even a good analogy for how emotions and other neurological states work.  This is part of why meditation is far more effective against stress and tension than is, for instance, the often counterproductive notion of catharsis.

Of course, sometimes things that work well for neurotypicals don’t work nearly as well for those on the autism spectrum*.  For instance, there is apparently some reasonable evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy, which often works quite well for neurotypicals with depression, is not as effective and can even be counterproductive for autistic people; we already tend to over-self-evaluate our cognitions, and so the tricks and workarounds of CBT often are not merely redundant but miss the issues entirely.

Along a line of possibly similar nature, I’ve written before about how meditation often serves to reduce my anxiety but at the same time worsens my depression.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, I think it’s all a matter of neurological states‒or neurohumoral states if you want to be slightly more precise.  I’ve spent nearly my whole life interested in such things; still, I have found neither evidence nor argument that has so far persuaded me that there’s any significant credence to the notion that humans are anything but temporary patterns of matter/energy, “spontaneously” self-assembled like any termite mound/colony or beehive/swarm**.

Once that pattern breaks because it can no longer sustain itself, due to injury or age or what have you, there is nothing more to it; it’s a hurricane that has passed.  There can be records and traces of its passing, and the damage it has done can linger for a long time, but there is no “afterlife” for weather patterns.

People are more complicated than hurricanes, at least in some senses, I will admit that.  But more intricate complexity doesn’t tend to make things more durable; it makes them more fragile, ceteris paribus.

Of course, all else is almost never equal.  Nevertheless, it’s often useful to consider complex matters as partial differential equations in more than one variable***; one explores the equation by holding all but one variable constant and differentiating or integrating along only one variable at a time.  As long as one thinks carefully about such things and never forgets that one is holding the other variables constant‒and by not forgetting, hopefully avoiding the oversimplification of one’s model of reality‒one can penetrate a great deal by recognizing when powerful tendencies persist even given the fact that other variables can influence matters.

For instance, the metallicity**** of stars influences the size at which they undergo certain levels of fusion, which is why it is thought that the earliest stars had different lifespans and luminosities relative to mass than later stars (like our sun).  But they still, overall, behave like stars, and the bigger ones shine brighter and last a shorter time than the less massive ones.  They are more alike than unalike, the narcissism of small differences notwithstanding.

Well…that tangent, or series of tangents, sure took me down unexpected paths!  But I guess that’s the nature of tangents; in any nonlinear but continuous function (even one as simple as a circle), there are a functionally infinite number of possible tangents.

I think that’s the right mathematical metaphor; isn’t it?  I guess it doesn’t much matter.  I’m just expressing my highly stochastic thoughts (I doubt they’re truly random) as they come.  But they would probably follow different courses if I did not express them in this fashion.

I hope your own thoughts are less troublesome to you than mine are to me and that you are at least at some degree of peace with yourselves and with each other.  You might as well be, though I know that’s not enough to guarantee it.  Still, do what you can, okay?

*Which I am, as you may know; I have written at least in passing about my recent, quite late, diagnosis.

**I don’t mean “like” here as “the same as” but rather “in the same fashion as”.

***My terminology is a bit sloppy here, but I’m not trying to be mathematically rigorous, I’m just trying to get my thoughts across with some clarity and accuracy.

****To astronomers/astrophysicists, a “metal” is any other element but hydrogen and helium (this no doubt irks chemists).  The earliest stars would have been almost entirely hydrogen and helium, certainly to start off.  Mind you, even later generation stars like the sun are still by far mostly hydrogen, but seemingly small “contaminants” can have noticeable effects on big systems, as in the fact that water vapor and carbon dioxide markedly affect Earth’s atmosphere and surface temperature despite being present in tiny amounts compared to nitrogen and oxygen.