science

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He reads the post with just his fist and still believes he gets the gist

Well, I said yesterday that there would be roughly a 50/50 chance whether today I would write on the lapcom or on the smartphone, and guess what:  today I am writing this either on the lapcom or on the smartphone!  How’s that for an accurate prediction?

But wait.  Which one am I using?  Can you tell just by reading this post?  Are you sure?

Of course, I know which one I’m using.  It would be most ‘passing strange if I did not know whether I am writing this on my lapcom or on my smartphone.

Is there a way for you, the reader, to tell?  Probably.  Almost certainly.

But do you know what that way is and how to apply it?  I doubt it very much.

That’s not an insult, by the way; I don’t know what it is or how to apply it, either.  I’m just pretty sure there is such a way.

Of course, from my own point of view, the metaphorical wavefunction has already collapsed, and there is only one possible remaining outcome, whereas before there were (at least) two.

I say “metaphorical wavefunction”, invoking the quantum mechanical notion of the collapse of previously superposed quantum states into one final state, but there are good reasons for us to doubt that notion’s accuracy even within quantum mechanics.  After all, it would be the only known physical process in the universe that is not time-reversible and which destroys information about prior states of reality.  That oughtta be a pretty big red flag for scientists.  It’s almost as bad as finding a process that seems to violate the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics*.

I find the Everettian approach to quantum foundations much more intuitive, personally.  That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more likely to be correct, but I think, I suspect, that it is.

Anyway, in the macroscopic world, the seemingly superposed possibilities that present themselves as we come to the point of a decision are not actual superpositions.  They are merely models we render in our minds of possible outcomes to try to improve our decisions.  In fact, in almost every case, it’s likely that the choice we make was “determined” ahead of time‒by the laws of physics, not by us.

I would guess that it was that way when Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics became so dominant despite its failings.  The problem is, Bohr and/or Heisenberg (I don’t recall which one) was by reputation exceptionally charismatic, and he was well able to ensure that his/their notion(s) became predominant, not because the ideas were more convincing, but because the people were (or the person was).

That’s not a good reason.

This is part of why I dislike the practice of public “debates” about controversial topics at pretty much any level.  When it becomes a contest in and of the moment, the “winner” of the debate is not necessarily the one with the best evidence and the most consistent and clear reasoning.  It is, often, the one more skilled at mere rhetoric, the better sophist, the one with the better ability to manipulate human cognitive biases, the one with the better speaking voice, the better looking one, the one who makes the best jokes (especially at the other’s expense).

This is not a good or reliable or useful way to measure empirical reality‒except that part of reality that tells us who is more superficially persuasive to Naked House Apes.

That’s part of why the court system in general is so bad:  the one who wins in court is not necessarily (or even probably) the one who is right, but rather the one who has the better lawyer with more resources.  This usually translates to “the one who happens to have more money.”  That’s not a good basis for any kind of system that refers to itself with the term “justice”.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?

Well, it would be nice if you could do your part toward at least improving these things in whatever way you might be able, especially if you are in any kind of influential position.  This here, this writing, is me doing at least some of my part, for whatever it’s worth.

In the meantime, I’d be interested to get your feedback:  do you think this post was written on the lapcom or on the smartphone?  Why do you think that?  Are those your real reasons?  Or are they the reasons you create‒some might say confabulate‒to justify a decision you made for reasons that are not clear to your conscious mind?

Please let me know in the comments.  And talk amongst yourselves there, too, if you like.

Also, please have a good day.

*This is not to say that it is impossible for net entropy to go down in a closed system.  It’s not only possible, but if you wait long enough, it’s going to happen somewhere, for the 2nd Law is statistical in character.  But for anything but the simplest situations, you’re going to have a wait for such an outcome.  Even if you’re just flipping 13 coins until you get all heads or all tails (or any other specific, ordered pattern you might want), then it’ll take a little while.  Getting all heads in a row (say) on 13 coins is a one in 8192 chance, if my mental arithmetic is right.  It would take some time, but you could pretty readily flip those 13 coins more than 8000 times, especially if you flip all 13 at once each time.  But anything much more involved than that (and just 2 more coins would require four times as many flips) becomes rapidly and astonishingly more unlikely.  If you’re waiting for any sensible region of, say, the Earth to experience spontaneously decreasing entropy, you’re going to be waiting such a long time that probably the current time (about 13.7 billion years) since our Big Bang would seem like an unnoticeably tiny fraction of the blink of an eye.  And, of course, the Earth is not going to be around that long‒not more than about another 4 or 5 billion years at most.  If that seems like a long time to you, you need to adjust your perspective.

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The name IS bond…but a double-N is more stable than a double-O

Well, it’s Friday at last, and this time, I can actually be pleased, because I don’t have to work tomorrow.

I suppose I don’t have to work any day, in principle.  I don’t have to do anything, really, if you think about it, and neither do you.  As Louis CK pointed out, if you really don’t want to do something, you can always kill yourself.  You can only do that once, but you can do it.

That was stand up comedy, of course, so don’t take it too seriously.  It’s not as though self-destruction is the only option.  One could instead just destroy the people and things that are trying to make you do something.  It would be a bit more work (ironically), but it would probably be much more satisfying*.

And it might be less work than you would think.  Most things and beings are far more breakable than they appear‒the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is always on your side here.  And, to quote another joker (this time the Joker), “Everything burns.”

Actually, though, strictly speaking, if we’re thinking of chemical burning/oxidation such as what the Joker did to that very large stack of money, then it is not true that everything burns.  Actually, burning such as we have here on the surface of the Earth may be an extremely rare cosmic phenomenon.

It only happens here because there is so much free molecular oxygen‒it’s roughly 20% of the atmosphere (by molar concentration, I believe, not necessarily by mass, since oxygen is a heavier element than nitrogen‒each molecule of oxygen is about 8/7 as massive as each molecule of nitrogen).  The percentage of oxygen was even higher in the past for a while; that was the time when those “giant” insects lived.

But free molecular oxygen is not stable for the long term, not if there are other chemical elements nearby.

Nitrogen molecules are stable, of course (else it wouldn’t remain the majority of the atmosphere‒it would, at the very least, react with oxygen).  N2 is a triple-bonded gas molecule, with some of the strongest bonds in all of chemistry.  This is part of why so many explosives are made with nitrogen based compounds.  The separated nitrogen atoms within want to join together, and they do so with a tremendous snap, releasing a lot of energy in the process.

Think of ammonium nitrate:  NH4+ /  NO3–.  If that gets enough of a kick, those nitrogen atoms crash together violently.  Then, of course, the four hydrogen atoms bond with two of the oxygens, releasing more energy and making water.  The remaining oxygen atom probably bonds with whatever atom it next encounters, I would guess.  That’s what oxygen tends to do, unlike nitrogen, which likes** to bond with itself best.

And that is why chemical, oxygen-based fires may only exist on the surface of the Earth (and any other planet that might have evolved organisms whose metabolism releases oxygen as a byproduct).  Free oxygen tends to react with any of many, many other kinds of atoms, and those bonds tend to be very stable.  CO2, for instance, is highly stable, as are the various silicon oxides***.

Indeed, it apparently took eons for the cyanobacteria and archaea that photosynthesized on the early Earth to produce enough oxygen to become a significant part of the atmosphere, because first the free oxygen reacted with all sorts of exposed other elements, such as iron.  It seems that rust as a kind of iron “ore” may not be all that common in the universe either!  It’s prevalent on Earth because of the oxygen that floated around reacting with it for millions and millions of years.

So, anyway, what was I saying?  Oh, yeah:  instead of destroying yourself so you don’t have to work, you could instead destroy the place that wants to make you work.  On Earth, at least, pretty much everything that isn’t already an oxide (and so is, in a sense, ash) can burn, so the Joker’s claim is not entirely incorrect within the appropriate bailiwick.

Or, on the other hand, you could just…not go to work.  If your job is so repugnant to you, you could seek another job or another way of life, and you probably would not need to destroy or even harm anyone.

But that’s crazy talk; we’ll have no more of that!  This is a family blog‒it has a wife blog and two children blogs at home****.

I hope you have a good weekend.

*Actually, satisfaction is a term that probably doesn’t even apply to the dead, so almost everything would at least have a higher “absolute value” or “magnitude” of satisfaction than being dead would have.  The problem is when that vector of satisfaction is pointing in a negative direction‒then, in the number line sense, being dead would entail being more satisfied, or at least less unsatisfied.

**I’m being reckless by using anthropomorphic language here and elsewhere in this post.  There is no reason to suspect that nitrogen atoms actually like anything, nor do they appear to have any capacity to have preferences (panpsychism notwithstanding…and it is not withstanding as far as I can see).  I am speaking figuratively for the sake of being able to convey things concisely, but please don’t be misled by intentional-seeming language.  Perhaps it would be better to say that it “tends to” rather than “likes to”.  It would be more accurate, but I think most people don’t really feel how strong such tendencies can be.

***These are even more stable than the carbon oxides, and they tend to be solid at typical temperatures and pressures, which tips the scales away from the likelihood of silicon-based life.  Otherwise, chemically, silicon is much like carbon, in having 4 valence electrons, each taking up a “half” orbital, so in principle it could, like carbon, make huge, long, complicated molecules analogous to DNA.  But the solidity and density and lack of solubility it engenders would tend to get it the way.  Silicon is also a larger atom and the valence electrons are farther out from the nucleus, so the bonding strength between silicons is weaker, and they don’t form four-partner bonds as stably as carbon.

****To steal a joke from Dave Barry.

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In nature’s infinite blog of secrecy a little I can read.

Hello and good morning.

I may be brief today*, because I am mentally fairly exhausted.  Yesterday was a bad day for me, pain-wise and mood-wise.  I’ve had large amounts of more than one kind of pain medicine on board, and I felt…well, I felt somewhat less pain in some places, but I’ve started to get some broader symptoms that I sometimes get when I’m taking too many NSAIDs for too long.

My thumbs and my knees and ankles and such are actually feeling wobbly and unstable as well as being generally a bit puffy and plenty sore.  This isn’t really like an inflammatory kind of swelling; that would indeed be a failure of the Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug(s) I take, would it not?  No, this feels more like a sense of having excess fluid in each joint, as well as in between them, and less tautness, less stability, and somewhat ironically, more pain, albeit of a slightly different character that usual.  It’s quite frustrating.

Also, my back and hips and shoulders don’t feel much, if any, better than usual.

I’ve been wondering lately if I might have some form of relatively mild hypermobility syndrome, which often goes along with ASD it seems (some of the causative genes are probably the same, or at least tend to travel together through the genome).

I have long had certain slightly atypical flexibility issues or attributes**.  For instance, I’ve always been able, with a bit of a pull, to put one or the other of my feet behind my head from a seated position.  I can also scratch pretty much any part of my own back, and I have always been able to do this, though I sometimes need to pull one arm a bit with the other.  Also, I have a hard time holding my head straight upright for very long at a time; it’s uncomfortable, and I need to lean it to one side or another pretty much constantly.  Maybe that’s just a weird habit, I don’t know.

Of course, hypermobility can be associated with various kinds of chronic pain, and can certainly make other things worse.  Unfortunately, it’s not something that can be cured, any more than autism can be cured (or any more than having a particular color of eyes or hair can be cured, though they can be masked, as by dyes or contact lenses).

I am far from sure about this tentative self-diagnosis, and I’m always leery of “second year med student syndrome”, but I think I am being reasonably objective here.  Genetic testing would be required to confirm something like Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, but I don’t meet the criteria for full-blown EDS***, and less full-blown syndromes may not easily (nor cheaply) be testable, or testable at all.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter much.  I do not expect my baseline previous health to be recoverable in any reasonable sense.  This is one reason I’m not too terribly worried about things like heart disease and infections and so on.  Why would I want to live a longer life of the kind I now live?  It’s like asking someone if they want the massive street construction project on their block, that’s slowing traffic and making terrible noise all day and into most nights, to be extended‒not by the workers doing more improvement, but just by working more slowly and being less efficient.

At least yesterday, in between doing payroll, processing deals on an unusually busy day, and trying to discourage my body from committing war crimes against itself, I remembered and indulged in a resource I haven’t used in a while:  I got on bioarXiv and skimmed through the abstracts of some of the more recently uploaded papers in general biology, neuroscience, genetics, molecular biology, and such like.  It can be kind of fun.

I don’t enjoy it as much as I do going to the original arXiv (hosted at my alma mater), which deals in physics, mathematics, computer science and the like.  But the bio site requires less mental effort and is simpler in many ways.  This is at least partly due to the fact that I am an MD, and I got my degree from one of the more research-oriented medical schools (we were required to do a publishable medical science research project as part of our degree) so the terminology is more or less at my fingertips.  This probably would apply even more at medrXiv, at which I spend less time than the latter two.

ArXiv, the physics/maths/CS site, has oodles of interesting articles always up‒I have, for instance, downloaded a PDF of a paper by David Deutsch from there‒but most require more mental effort than on the other sites, because I don’t have as good a handle on some of the jargon, and I often need to review the mathematics involved, or more often try to absorb it for the first time.  Still, it’s very cool, though it’s a real embarrassment of riches; it’s like being in the biggest candy store in the world,  but having only three dollars to your name, and having to choose what to buy with it.

The potential opportunity costs are staggering, but I guess that’s a good problem to have.

Speaking of reviewing mathematics, I found a nice little YouTube channel by a woman from MIT who does good reviews of basic integration and more advanced techniques like integration by parts and trig substitutions and such like.  I find her stuff much less sleep-inducing than the videos on 3Blue1Brown, though Grant has oodles of great videos, well-produced and in-depth but clear, about many topics in mathematics.  Unfortunately, his voice is if anything too calm for me, and his animations, though superb, are if anything too smooth.

I think, also, that I learn better by seeing someone writing the stuff out‒possibly this engages my mirror neurons and thus makes more of my whole brain focused on what’s happening.

Incidentally, the lady mentioned above is not officially affiliated with MIT, she just went there.  But you can actually “attend” lecture courses in various subjects in Physics, in Mathematics, in Economics, in Computer Science, and so on, from MIT at their YouTube channel.  It’s truly remarkable, and if you’re just after learning the stuff but aren’t seeking an Official Piece of Paper™, it’s a tremendous resource!  Stanford also has similar online lecture courses, as I think does CalTech.

I’m pretty sure Harvard does this also, but there’s no need for any of you to go slumming there.  Why not just watch Baby Shark or something‒and Gangnam Style is actually pretty enjoyable.  I know, I know, Steven Pinker is at Harvard, and he’s one of the most enjoyable (and thought-provoking) public thinkers in the world, but I don’t think he gives any of their online lectures.

Although, given the notorious grade inflation known to be rampant at Harvard, you might just get an official “A” from them simply by clicking on one of their videos.

Okay, I’m at the stage of taking cheap shots at Harvard (they do not deserve such disrespect, even though there really is a problem with grade inflation), so I’ll call this post to a close.  I hope you’re all having a better week, year, decade, and life than I am having.  Though, really, if you’re not reading preprint scientific papers for free online, how good can your life be?

TTFN

*I was not.  Perhaps this is analogous to the situation that led to the famous quote about not having time enough to write a short letter‒only in this case, it is not time but mental energy that limits my concision.

**Some of these things are slightly curtailed now because I am too plump, but that’s a different issue.

***No, I do not refer to Ross Perot’s old company, Electronic Data Systems.

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Should you give a fig about a freight train’s Newtons?

It’s Saturday, April 25th, in 2026 AD/CE.  There are only 7 shopping months until Newtonmas (Other holidays are available).

Anyway, I’m very groggy and tired today, though at least I am (for the moment) in slightly less pain than yesterday.  It still sucks, but now it’s more of a neutron star kind of sucking rather than a full scale black hole.

Not that either of those two stellar remnants can be said to “suck” in any atypical way, with respect to gravity.  It is true that the gravitation at the surface of a neutron star is extremely high (to say nothing of the “surface” of a black hole).  But that’s just because everything is so compact, and you can get much closer to the center of gravity than you would be able to do with more spread-out astronomical bodies made of more typical matter.

But, to reiterate a perhaps overused example, if the sun were suddenly (and without any other phenomena that would complicate the picture) to collapse* into a neutron star or even a black hole of the same mass, the Earth’s orbit would not change at all.

There’s no special “supergravity” or whatever some people imagine there might be due to black holes or neutron stars.  It’s just ordinary gravity with a large mass in a small region.  From farther away than the former surface of whatever collapsed into it, the gravity of a neutron star or a black hole is literally indistinguishable from that of the celestial object that became the black hole or neutron star (if it did not lose any mass in its collapse to the latter state, which in reality they almost always do).

How the hell did I get on that subject?  I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see it while editing.

I’m a little out of it this morning, because I took half a Benadryl last night in addition to my other, more typical stuff.  I don’t usually take Benadryl on a work night, but groggy and unpleasant quasi-consciousness that at least helps me to be unconscious is better than not being able even to get to sleep or stay that way for long and being groggy because of that rather than the side effects of an antihistamine.

Something like that, anyway; I’m not sure I made that very clear.

I’ve just now become briefly distracted because a redirected freight train just went by on the track in front of me (going south on the usually-northbound side of the tracks, something for which there were no doubt legitimate reasons, but which still feels quite wrong).  This happens occasionally, and I’m sure the process that leads up to it is somewhat interesting, at least from a certain point of view.

It’s definitely an event that happens only because something has gone wrong somewhere.  The tracks for commuter trains, like the course over which they run, are not really meant for heavy freight trains, so they can’t let them use them very often.  And it was heavy, I’m sure of that. There were numerous tank cars and box cars and all sorts of similar cars carrying potentially heavy stuff.  Even the train’s whistle as it approached was a different, lower pitched sound and had a more somber timbre (sombre timber?) than the usual Tri rail whistle.

I already was pretty sure it wasn’t a regular train when the nearby gates went down to stop traffic, because there’s no scheduled Tri rail train going in either direction at even close to that time on a Saturday.  If it were a behind-schedule train, it would have to have been the first train of the day going south, and it would be quite off its schedule indeed.  Trains only come every hour on the weekend.

I almost wrote “every hour on the hour” there, just for the “sound” of it, but of course it’s not feasible to have a commuter train arrive every hour on the hour at every train station unless the stations are an hour’s traveling distance apart.  That would be one hell of a commute, and not in a good way.

Anyway, I think that’s enough nonsense for today.  I still don’t feel good.  My legs and hips are still channeling low-level but constant DC current (or so it feels), and I am having more and more trouble seeing any point to continuing to try to style my way though all this.  It’s been more than 20 years and things are not improving overall.

It would be more tolerable if I had other people and reasons and points in my daily life, but I don’t, not really.  The comments here below this blog constitute the majority of my socialization, not counting work interactions (which are a different kind of thing, though related).

I’m so bloody tired.

Anyway, have a good weekend if you can.  For goodness sake, cherish the people you love and who love you, especially if you’re lucky enough to be with them every day.  And remember, when in doubt, don’t ask yourself “What would Newton do?”.  Unless you’re a scientist, that is, in which case, yeah, Newton was a decent role model.

Otherwise, he was a terribly unpleasant, vindictive, and spiteful man (and here I thought it impossible for me to admire him more than I already did).  He is reported to have laughed only once in his life, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid.

I sympathize with Newton there.  That is an idiotic question for anyone who is stuck living in and making their way through three-dimensional, locally Euclidean space.

Mind you, when things like black holes and neutron stars are involved, you need to go beyond Euclid, but you can’t readily go beyond Euclid if you’ve never gotten to Euclid***.

*There’s no known process by which this could happen, by the way, so don’t worry about it.  Also, you don’t need to worry about encountering spherical cows or frictionless surfaces**.

**Though I’ve long thought that “Frictionless Cows” might be a good name for a band.

***You don’t need to read Euclid’s actual book to study Euclidean geometry, any more than you need to read Newton’s Principia Mathematica to learn Newtonian physics.  But it’s worth giving them each a tip of the hat in passing, at least, for they are among humanity’s greatest works.

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We have met the cosmic horror, and…

Well, here I go again (on my own, like the song says) writing another blog post.  As for why I am doing so, well, there is surely a set of causes‒potentially tracing all the way back to the Big Bang, or at least the period just during and/or after inflation, assuming that happened, which seems more likely than not‒there may not be any good reason for it.

Oh, of course, I could come up with reasons.  I could “justify” myself.  Indeed, there is reason (har) to think that justification and persuasion to bolster one’s status and identity in a tribe against others with opposed motives may have been one of the driving forces behind the development of the human reasoning capacity.  This is apart from, and perhaps almost orthogonal to, the basic power of reasoning to understand and thus best navigate the territory of reality.

Once it got started, reasoning would have accelerated thanks to biological arms races between those competing for survival and reproduction, and then it would have turned out serendipitously to have been more broadly and powerfully useful than merely for securing status and food and mates.

Imagine if the peacock’s tail had turned out not only to be ostentatious and beautiful and sexy (to peahens, anyway) but tremendously useful and broadly powerful, especially once it reached a certain level.  Imagine if the peacock’s tail had allowed peacocks to build skyscrapers and boats and trains and planes and cars, if peacocks’ tails helped peacocks build a global civilization, quite apart from their ability to secure one’s status and acquire good mates.

That’s quite possibly more or less what happened with human brains.

Of course, like the peacock’s tail, the human brain is not without its drawbacks.  I suspect that things like depression and anxiety, and perhaps even neurodivergence, are simply potential (and statistically inevitable) outcomes for a brain that has grown powerful enough to assess the world deeply and uncover the almost Lovecraftian terror of our tiny little existence when placed against the scope and scale of the cosmos.

I say “Lovecraftian”, but even with Lovecraft, though the beings in the mythos are thoroughly inhuman and incomprehensible‒unsane, as I like to say‒they are still beings.  The true cosmic horror is surely that beings of any kind are almost nonexistent; indeed, to a very good approximation, they are nonexistent.

In some senses, this can at least be morally reassuring.  If we do go and spread out through the universe‒or even just the galaxy or even just our local family of stars‒and there are indeed no other life forms, then at least we need not worry about violating implicit rights.  Uninhabited asteroids (for instance) don’t have goals or wishes and, as far as we can tell, they cannot suffer.

Of course, we may have aesthetic concerns about such things, but aesthetics are not as urgent as ethics.  And, of course, we will still have moral/ethical concerns toward each other; that almost goes without saying.

Whether or not we will exist long enough for the ethics (or lack thereof) of changing the state of uninhabited other places in the galaxy to be pertinent is quite uncertain.  I see nothing in the laws of physics that makes it impossible, so in that sense, I am optimistic.  But I see nothing in the laws of physics, nor more specifically in human nature, that makes it certain or even likely that we will survive to spread out from our native planet to any significant degree.  And I see nothing in the laws of nature that seems to imply that, if we don’t succeed and spread through the cosmos, anyone else will do so, or indeed that anyone else even exists.

Don’t get me wrong; physics clearly and undeniably allows life to exist, and it allows (human-like) intelligence and civilization to exist.  But those are two different scales of allowance.

The molecules and principles of life as we know it, with long-chain molecules capable of carrying information and of replicating themselves, leading to “competition” and “improvement” and increasing complexity and so on, seem so straightforward as to be happening potentially (but far from certainly) in a good many places in the universe.  This is straightforward enough.  The equivalents of viruses and prokaryotes may exist in many regions.  It’s even possible that there may be such life in other places in our solar system (Europa and Enceladus being possible contenders).

But multicellular, “eukaryotic” life, seems likely to be much rarer.  Basic life started on Earth, as far as we can see, very shortly after the Earth formed and cooled enough for complex molecules to endure (nearly 4 billion years ago).  Eukaryotes, especially multicellular ones, didn’t really arrive until about 500 million years ago.  So, seven eighths into the time of life on Earth, it was basically just “bacteria” and some viruses.

Then, for significant, interpersonal, symbolic and technological intelligence to develop took another…well, basically another 500 million years.  And as far as we can tell, it’s only happened once.

That doesn’t give us a good, clear picture of how rare or common such a thing is‒one is a difficult number of experimental subjects from which to draw too many conclusions‒but it’s possible that the existence of technologically intelligent life is so rare as to occur only once per, on average, every chunk of spacetime as large as our visible universe.  It could even be rarer than that.

In an infinite cosmos, of course, even such exceedingly rare events would happen an infinite number of times (so to speak).  But that doesn’t necessarily make things less lonesome.  If you have an infinite number of decks of cards (with no jokers), all thoroughly shuffled together, there are literally just as many Aces of Spades as there are red-suited cards in total (ℵ₀, the “smallest” infinity).  Nevertheless, if you draw cards randomly, you will only get an Ace of Spades one twenty-sixth as often as you will get a red-suited card.

Similarly, there are as many whole multiples of a trillion as there are integers in general (again, ℵ₀), but if you pick a random integer, you’re still only going to pull such a multiple one out of a trillion times (on average).

So, maybe the takeaway is that the real cosmic horror may be that we are the only entities haunting the abyss, and there are no (other) mad idiot gods bubbling away at the center of celestial existence.  Maybe it’s just us.  And if our lights go out, then nobody is home.

It’s worth considering, not least because it has every chance of being true, whether literally or just practically.  For if the nearest other technological life form is in another galactic cluster, for instance, then we are, for all reasonable purposes, alone in the universe.

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Queasy does it

Ugh, it’s Monday again.  I’m very much not ready to start another work week.  I’ve felt a bit queasy and under the weather since yesterday afternoon‒probably due to some dietary indiscretion, I don’t know‒and just felt kind of icky.  I’m not nauseated at the moment, though, just kind of wiped.

I’m sure that’s how you were hoping to begin your week of reading blog posts:  with news of my upset stomach from yesterday.  One can imagine Tom Brokaw, or perhaps even Walter Cronkite, breathlessly delivering such a bulletin, am I right?  What would the banner headline in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal say about such a story?

Probably nothing, of course.  Imagine how slow and anti-interesting a news day would have to be for major news outlets to carry stories about my minor ailments.

Not to say that the ailments of certain people don’t get covered; they do, of course.  Sometimes this is just frivolous curiosity or even prurient interest, as in the case of “celebrities”.  Sometimes it really is important, as in the case of powerful individuals who carry great responsibilities.  In those cases, people can legitimately be concerned, especially if the responsibilities carried by these individuals are things only they can do.  That’s rare in the real world, but it can happen*.

Oy, sorry about the interruption there.  I had a little sneezing fit.  Oh, wait, you all didn’t experience that interruption; only I did.  How embarrassing.  I shouldn’t have said anything.  Well, it’s too late now.

Though, of course, it isn’t too late, not for me as I write it‒I could change it if I wanted to change it.  But by the time you read this, then, yes, it will be too late for me to change it.  I mean, I could edit the post after the fact‒I have that power‒but it wouldn’t affect those who had already read it.

I could conceivably affect your memory of what it had originally said if I changed it and then persistently repeated the lie that it had never been the way I originally posted it.  But even if I got everyone in the universe to believe the lie‒getting them all to care would be a big enough undertaking‒it would not change the fact of what had originally happened.

This underscores the true, fundamental powerlessness of lies.  Words can change what people “believe” in the short term, but talk is cheap (mother fucker).  No matter how much a person believes they can fly under their own power, if they step off the top of a tall building (on Earth, in normal gravity) they will plummet.

And they may believe, all the way down, that they are actually flying and that the falling is the illusion, but once they reach the bottom, everything with which they believe anything will, if the fall was far enough, be utterly broken, perhaps even scattered across the pavement.  All that they believed or remembered will be obliterated, in a very true sense of the word.

That’s one of the good, albeit sometimes frustrating, things about reality.  Whatever it is, it is, regardless of whether anyone believes it or even knows it, regardless of whether there even exists anyone who can know it.

How did I get there from having noted that I felt sick yesterday and don’t feel great today to be starting the week?  I’m sure it’ll be clear in the editing process.  But it is a fact that I got to this point, so it happened somehow.

I don’t really know what else to discuss.  Nothing of consequence happens in my life anymore, not even from the narrow, parochial point of view of my own mind.  At this stage, my life is of more or less of zero significance to anyone, including me, so I guess it doesn’t matter what I discuss.

I’m very tired, though, and it’s just the start of the day and the week.  I hope I get to feeling better as the week goes along, though the second law of thermodynamics seems to imply that such a thing is by no means guaranteed to happen, and indeed, in the long run, will definitely not happen.  At least, the tendency for entropy to increase is as definite as anything we know.

Clearly, though, huge regions of low entropy are possible; the universe as we know it “began” in such a state.  Mind you, we wouldn’t want to be suddenly transported to such a low entropy region of spacetime, as they are not readily amenable to life, which is dependent upon local gradients in free energy and entropy.  This is why life occurred in sort of the “middle state” of the universe, the mixing state, as when one sees the many swirling forms and patterns in one’s coffee cup as one is pouring in milk or cream, before the mixing finally becomes uniform.

Also, though quite uniform and low entropy, the Big Bang was also pretty darn hot, and I’m not speaking metaphorically.

If one could open a teeny, tiny wormhole back to some region of the early universe just after the Big Bang, one could conceivably obtain functionally limitless energy**.  But that would affect the subsequent evolution of the early universe, I suspect, though perhaps it could not possibly affect the universe in such a way as to prevent itself from being instantiated.  Or, well, maybe for that reason it cannot be instantiated.

I don’t know.  I’m tired.  You can probably tell.  Anyway, I hope you have a good day and a good week.

*Though no examples spring to mind.  If you can think of one, please share it in the comments below.

**Though, would that outweigh the energy required to create and maintain the wormhole?  I have a strong intuition that it would not.

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Reality, calories, and joules, oh my!

I had a moment of idle curiosity this morning just before starting to write this.  I recalled the bit of trivia that the average human power output/consumption is something around 80 or 100 Watts.  I wasn’t sure which was more typical, but it doesn’t really matter; the numbers are well within the same order of magnitude, despite having nominally different numbers of digits.

Anyway, I decided to convert that into kilocalories* per day, just to confirm that the typically described numbers match up, because if they don’t, then something very strange is going on.

A Watt is a joule per second**, so to figure out how much energy output (in joules) there is in or from a human per day, you just multiply the watts times the number of seconds in a day (24 hours per day x 60 minutes per hour x 60 seconds per minute, or 86,400 seconds per day).  Multiply that by the above-noted wattage and you get between about 6 and 8 million joules per day.

Now, there are 4,184 joules per kilocalorie, so dividing that into the number of joules yields:  roughly between 1600 and 2000 kilocalories a day, which matches the data on basal metabolic rates.  Neat.

Of course, they must match up, otherwise there would clearly be some major logical inconsistencies in our understanding of such thermodynamicalish matters.  I don’t suspect that such a mismatch would have survived the scrutiny of scientists much longer than a snowball would last in a blast furnace; in other words, I consider textbook level physics to be pretty darn reliable.  Nevertheless, it is good occasionally to check even such basic things, just to confirm for yourself that your understanding of reality is internally consistent and consistent with that which is measured and described by other people.

This is not to say that I worry about whether my “reality” is significantly different than that of other people.  I don’t.  While I have no doubt that the specific details of my personal experience are unique, this is so only in rather trivial ways.

I’ve not encountered any occurrence or argument that made me doubt whether everyone around me is subject to the same laws of physics as those to which I am subject.  Of course, if tasked or merely bored, I can conceive of ways in which all that I think I know is illusory and/or delusional, as in the argument that precedes the cogito in Descartes’s most famous (non-mathematical) work.

With a bit of effort, one can almost always imagine ways in which the world could be deeply different than it seems.  I’ve been known to do that at length‒indeed, at book length‒myself.  But the fact that a thing can be imagined is not a reason, by itself, to promote a concept into “might actually be true” space.  Presumably, there are limitless such things that could be imagined, but almost by definition (at least as I am using the word) there is only one reality.

Reality, as far as I can see, cannot contradict itself; actual paradoxes cannot be instantiated.  I’d probably be prepared to bet my life on those propositions.  But even if reality could contradict itself, that would also be a fact about reality.  Whatever reality is, it is.

That’s trivial, of course, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded of the trivial things that one carries in one’s background knowledge but rarely considers or reconsiders‒things like the interchangeability of measures of energy and power and heat between different units.

With that full circle moment, I’m going to finish for today.  I’m still very tired, and I’m rather discouraged and despondent and probably other d-words as well.  This blog is all I really do, anymore, but my energy is lagging even for this.  At least I don’t need to do payroll today, since I had to get it done early yesterday…which fact I found out yesterday.

Oh, well.  Please do what you can to have a good day.  And remember, there is no do or do not.  There is only try.

*This is what we call “calories” when speaking of human energy intake and output, but a single “true” calorie is the amount of energy (heat) required to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade (or, well, Kelvin if you want to be pedantish).  A kilocalorie, or what we commonly call a calorie, is enough to raise a kilogram of water 1 degree Kelvin.

**A joule being the unit of energy in “SI” units.  A joule (energy) is the integral of force with respect to distance, or a Newton-meter.  A Newton is the measure of force, and is a kilgram-meter/ second-squared.  So joules have the units kilogram-(meter squared)/second squared.  Watts (a measure of power, or energy per unit time) are joules per second, which fact gives us the fun, lovely phenomenon of having cubic seconds in the denominator of the equation!

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“I find myself growing fatigued, Doctor.”

Hey, everybody.  It’s Tuesday, and here I am writing another blog post.  Huzzah.

I’m rather tired today, which I guess shouldn’t be that surprising, given that I have chronic trouble sleeping.  Still, some days hit me worse than others, for reasons that are probably multifactorial and are certainly difficult to tease apart.  And today, so far, seems to be one of the “I feel more tired than usual by a noticeable margin” days.  You’ve probably all had such days, though you may not have used that specific term for them*.

There is some good news, news that in a way is not world news but is extraterrestrial news, at least temporarily:  the Artemis mission has flown ‘round the far side of the moon, and in so doing has brought humans farther away from Earth even than Apollo 13 did; this is now the farthest humans have ever been.

It’s quite momentous, but the fact of this mission and its (so far) success, raises questions.  I suspect the answers to them are disappointingly trivial, however.  For instance, why was there such a delay in returning to the Moon after the last time in 1972?  The answer to that is at least somewhat clear when one poses the related question:  why did we work so hard to go to the Moon back in the late 60s/early 70s?

Of course, the main reasons were:  primate dominance/hierarchy drives, writ large across the planet.  The Apollo program was, in a barely metaphorical sense, the ultimate dick-measuring contest, and the USA won that one pretty clearly at the time (“Mine reaches all the way to the Moon and back, how ‘bout yours, motherf#cker?”).  The fact that the Soviet Union basically admitted defeat in that region in that round is but one piece among the mountains of evidence confirming that, yes Victoria, humans did indeed land on the Moon.

It wasn’t for purely scientific reasons, though.  In fact, the science at the time took a very distant, rear-facing-storage-area-of-the-station-wagon place compared to the politics that was in the driver’s seat.

Alas, human nature being what it seems to be, perhaps truly amazing innovation and advancement is simply much more likely to occur during conflict (literal and figurative).  Maybe even the Beatles, for instance, were so great at least partly because of the (usually friendly) competitiveness between John and Paul, and also George once he found his considerable mojo.  Ringo was the Samwise Gamgee/Bodhisattva of the group, which seems appropriate for a drummer.

Humans presumably have always had the capacity to make the many scientific discoveries and technological advancements that have occurred in recent centuries.  But they needed to have an impetus before anyone would get anything done.  The two strongest inherent drives are survival and reproduction, and those drives interact and accumulate as humans gather in larger numbers, and they sublimate into national competitiveness‒for wealth and power, for luxury, for prestige, for all that nonsense.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could deliberately control our motivation?  We have crude means of affecting it already‒caffeine and various other stimulants‒but these are blunt yet jagged tools.  In principle, microelectrodes could be implanted into something like the nucleus accumbens or the reticular activating system or more well-chosen, finely tuned areas of the nervous system.  Then one could use a remote control to give oneself motivation when desired (?).  Presumably, other mental states could be manipulated, encouraged, discouraged, etc.  Just watch out that no one else gets their hands on your remote control!

Maybe it would be better to have a helmet with various directed electromagnets to stimulate specific brain regions at will.  This process is already in use in relatively simple form**, but it could be honed and made more precise and more powerful and useful.  It would be nice to be able to have large-scale motivation that didn’t require the tendency toward large-scale destruction.

It may be an inevitable challenge.  Powerful forces can inherently have very good and/or very bad effects depending on circumstances and, of course, depending on what one means by “good” and “bad”.

Not to say that we couldn’t rather easily be doing things better than we are.  We could.  But…it seems we aren’t sufficiently motivated to do so.

*If you did, that would be truly surprising.  It would be so surprising, in fact, that if you told me it was the case, I would more strongly suspect some manner of deception or illusion or delusion or cognitive bias than that it was actually true (this is reminiscent of Hume’s test for the veracity of supposed miracles).

**And is involved in the plot of my book(s) Unanimity, Books 1 and 2.

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If you can look into the seeds of time, and blog which grain will grow and which will not

Hello, and also, good morning.

What to write about, what to write about‒that is the question today.  Of course, “to be or not to be” is always the question as well, as was recognized by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.  If I recall, he arrives at the conclusion that the titular rock-rolling protagonist must be “happy” despite the patent and constant pointlessness and absurdity of his existence.

That goes along with the whole recognition of the absurdity of life itself that is central to the existentialism movement.  Still, it’s hard for me to “imagine Sisyphus happy”, unless he was a true Bodhisattva or had been thoroughly lobotomized by Zeus (or whoever it was that had doomed him to his…well, his doom).

It can help, I guess, to think about the vast scale of the cosmos in space and time (and any other dimensionality that might apply) and also about the incredibly minute scale of the cosmos, the fundamental quantum fields (and whatever gravity ultimately is) interacting from the Planck scale on up.  It helps keep things in perspective.

Of course, even given the scales of the cosmos*, there’s another, almost sort of Buddhist/Taoist notion that notes that each individual‒each particle even‒always exists at the nexus of two “light cones”, existing in an ever-moving now.  These are 4-dimensional cones, by the way, but it’s okay to reduce things by one dimension if you will.  It makes them easier to visualize.

Your (or anyone’s) past light cone is the outer boundary of all influences that can possibly have had any effect upon you at the present moment‒those influences that could have reached you at the speed of light or more slowly.  Similarly, one’s future light cone encompasses all those things that could possibly be influenced by things at the present location at or below the speed of light.

Any motion within the light cones‒the only motion that anything within spacetime can execute, as far as we know‒is called timelike motion.  Any motion that would require going outside a light cone is considered “spacelike” motion, and is not allowed by relativity.  This is not merely because of the speed of light, it’s because the speed of light is defined by the speed of causality.  Causes cannot travel faster or have effects beyond the speed of causality.  This is a bit tautological, I know, but it nevertheless simply must be true.

So each individual’s experience, each individual process, sits at the moving balance point of a future light cone and a past light cone, crossing at the moving present, tracing out a “timelike” path in spacetime.  Of course, individual creatures are not individual particles, and so their overall spacetime path would resemble the final line produced by a sketcher going over and over a particular path to make the curve the artist desires.

If one could look at the structure of a human in spacetime, like the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse Five, but one could also trace even the spacetime paths of individual “particles”**, a human life would be a sort of higher-dimensional braid in spacetime, surrounded by a haze of incoming and outgoing quantum entities, most of which will be locally bound and interacting, and so will be moving at a net velocity lower than the speed of light.

I’m assuming you don’t eat your food or drink your water or breathe your air or (shudder) sweat or excrete at near light speed.

Imagine what the inside of a mere proton or neutron might look like if one were able to see it as a rendered, four-dimensional model in fine detail!  If you think it wouldn’t be that interesting because it’s so wee, think again.

Remember, only the tiniest fraction of the “rest mass” of a nucleon comes from the mass of the three “net” quarks in it (two up, one down or two down, one up depending on whether it’s a proton or neutron).  Almost all the rest of its mass is the energy of the interactions between these three quarks:  all the gluons exchanged, all the virtual quark/anti-quark pairs popping into existence, mediated by that famous strong force and its weird*** “asymptotic freedom”.

Bringing this back around, I guess my point was merely to note that everyone and everything is pointless from the perspective of the laws of nature and the spacetime scale of the cosmos, but when you learn about those things‒the cosmos at large and small levels‒you are at least familiarizing yourself with those vast workings, and you are in a sense taking part of them into yourself.  That’s kind of a cool thought.

But don’t take too much of it into yourself!  For, much as would happen to someone who stuffed all the information about Graham’s number into one head, if you do you will become a black hole.  Now, it may be possible to survive becoming a black hole, but I don’t recommend betting on that pony.

TTFN

*I wrote a post on Iterations of Zero about how it might be useful for people to consider the cosmic perspective as contrasting with their prosaic concerns.  I don’t remember how good it was, but here’s the link, in case you want to read it and give any feedback you like.

**I use this word for want of a better term that everyone would recognize and that would be succinct.  I think we need such a different term, because a lot of the perceived so-called weirdness and mystery of quantum mechanics comes from trying to use inaccurate terms that originated in times before we understood things as well as we now do.  Quanta are not little “particles” that sometimes act like waves, nor are they little waves that sometimes act like particles (though that’s slightly more accurate).  They are entities unto themselves, and the ways they behave are all always consistent with that nature.  They don’t sometimes act like one thing and at other times act like another.  They all, always, act like what they are.

***Except it’s not weird, really.  Those of us who are surprised by it?  We are the weird ones.  Quantum chromodynamics has always done exactly what it still does, since long before any life at all existed in this universe.  To quote Yudkowsky again, “Since the beginning not one unusual thing has ever happened.”

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Our wills and fates do so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown; Our blogs are ours, their ends none of our own.

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 26th of February in 2026, a date that’s only very slightly interesting whether you write it as 2-26-2026 or 26-2-2026.  The fact that you have repeated 2s and repeated 26s is somewhat entertaining, but the zero throws potential symmetries off, making it not nearly as much fun as it could conceivably be.  It’s a shame, really.  I suppose you could write it as 26-02-2026 and rescue a bit of symmetry, but that feels like reaching.  It’s not quite symmetrical anyway, unless one is writing in base-26 or higher.  No, wait, even that wouldn’t work.

I don’t know about what I’m going to write this morning.  That in itself, of course, is nothing unusual.  But I don’t feel that I have much to say about anything at the moment.  I don’t want to get into my depression and ASD and anxiety and chronic pain and insomnia and just general moribund state, because I’m sure no one wants to hear about it anymore, and in any case, there seems to be no way anyone can do anything about it that’s useful, which makes it all the more frustrating.  Writing about it certainly hasn’t cured or even improved my state much, if at all.

Anyway, as I said the other day, you have been put on notice.  Unless you just started reading my blog for the first time yesterday, you’ve no right to act fucking surprised no matter what happens.

Okay, that’s that out of the way.

Now, let’s see, what should I write today?  I could discuss some topics in science, especially physics, though I also have literal, legally recognized expertise in biology, and I know a lot about quite a few other branches of science as well.  This is because I have always been curious about how the world, the universe, actually and literally works on the largest and on the most fundamental scales.

I mean, yes, humans also have their rules and laws and social mores and antisocial morays and all that nonsense, but if you step back even a bit, you can see nearly all human behavior encapsulated by basic primatology.  If you know how the various monkeys and gibbons and gorillas and chimpanzees behave‒especially their commonalities‒human behavior almost always fits right in.  It’s usually not even very atypical.

That doesn’t make the specifics of behavior very easily predictable in any given case, necessarily; then again, we understand an awful lot about the weather and the climate, but the specifics of tomorrow’s weather are tough to predict precisely and accurately, let alone next week’s weather.  Nevertheless, the physics of longer term climate effects of certain kinds of atmospheric gases is almost trivial.

Anyway, humans are too annoying to be very interesting, except in special circumstances.  In this, they are perhaps a bit like cockroaches.  From the point of view of a scientist who studies them, they can be interesting, and from just the right angle and with the right detachment, they can even be beautiful (or some of them can).  But overall, they are merely large masses of highly redundant little skitterers, just doing their shit-eating and reproducing and infesting almost every possible location.

Which type of creature did I mean to describe just now?  See if you can figure it out.

Of course, on closer scales, cognitive neuroscience and neurodevelopment and related stuff, such as “neural” networks, “deep” learning, and other such areas are fascinating.  One thing interesting about them is how all the things that brains and computers and so on are and do are implicit in the laws of physics‒clearly they are some of the things that stuff in the universe can do‒and yet, for all we know, they have only ever happened here, just this once in all the vast and possibly infinite cosmos*.

And for all we can tell, given the human proclivity to plan about 20 Planck units ahead and then after that trust to luck, this could be the only place they occur, and their time will not continue much longer, certainly not on a cosmic scale.

I could be wrong about that…except in the sense that, since I am stating it merely as one of the possibilities, I am not actually wrong at all.  Even if humans do survive into cosmic time scales and become cosmically significant, it will still not be easily debatable that it could have happened that humans would go extinct and would fail to go anywhere but Earth.

Of course, depending on the question of determinism, I suppose one could say that if humans (or their descendants) become cosmically significant then there literally was nothing else that could have happened, at least as seen from outside, at the “end”.

On the other hand, if Everettian quantum mechanics is the best description of the fundamental nature of reality, then in some sense, every quantum possibility actually happens “somewhere” in the universal quantum wave function, though those variations may not include all conceivably possible human outcomes.

Some things that seem as though they should be possible may simply never happen to occur (or occur to happen?) anywhere in the possible states of the universe.  That feels as though it should be unlikely, given how many possible states can be locally evolved in the quantum wave function, but I don’t think we know enough to be sure.

Okay, well, I vaguely hope that this has been mildly interesting and perhaps thought provoking.  It would be enjoyable to get more feedback and thoughts, but I don’t have a very large readership, and only a certain small percentage of people ever seem to interact with written material in any case, so I’m probably lucky to get the feedback that I get.

TTFN

*With the inescapable caveat that, if the universe is spatially and/or temporally infinite, and if as it seems there are only a finite number of differentiable quantum states in any given region of spacetime (the upper limit of which is defined by the surface area of an event horizon the size of the given region) then every local thing that happens, and all possible variations thereof, “happen” an infinite number of times.  But given that all these regions are more or less absolutely physically distinct and incapable of “communicating” one with another, they can be considered isolated instances in a “multiverse” rather than parts of the same “local universe”.