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Blog post for 11-18-2025, Tuesday

Well, it’s Tuesday and I’m already exhausted after just one day of work for the week.  Mind you, it was a strange day at work, with people struck with family tragedies, people with personal catastrophes (such as a DUI), my coworker out sick, and all that sort of stuff.  The things that were/are not usual were manifold, and they are very unpleasant to me.

Also, I’ve had a dull, kind of pressure-like headache for the last perhaps 18 hours (with some lulls), and it feels almost like a “mini migraine”.  It certainly interferes with my mental acuity.  It may interfere with my writing; I can’t really tell.  If anyone notices anything regarding that, I would be grateful if you would let me know*.

I also feel a bit queasy, which goes along with the low-grade migraine notion.  I am going in to the office anyway, though.  First off, I don’t know if my coworker will still be out sick, and I don’t want to leave other people too much in the lurch.  In addition, if I get behind on things for one day, I’ll just have to catch up on things the next day, eliminating any potential benefit from resting for a day.

Also, let’s be real:  I don’t enjoy spending time at the house.  I need to rest there frequently‒longer than I actually do‒but it’s not pleasant for me.

Speaking of rest, I had a really bad sleep last night.  I mean, I didn’t sleep more than maybe half an hour before 3 this morning.  Then I dozed for a wee bit‒less than an hour.  But now I’m up, exhausted but not sleepy.

What am I doing?  Why am I doing it?  What is the point?  Why do I bother going on?  Is it just fear of death that prevents me from dying?  Or is it also the fear of hurting people who matter to me?

But if they love me, why would they want me to suffer?  I understand that there is nothing they can do for me, of course.  But then they should accept things they cannot change, not wish for some other person to endure without reward or with no assistance.

Actually, all these things, these wishes from other people, are in my head.  Very few people have said they want me not to die.

I don’t think that’s because all the other people do want me to die.  Most people are probably pretty much indifferent.  Most people don’t worry about other people much because they’re too busy imagining that other people are “worrying about” them.

But they aren’t.  It’s just not workable.  People think about other people, of course, and especially about their family and friends.  But they cannot think about them much.  I don’t know what the percentage is, but it’s hard enough trying to pay attention to oneself and one’s actions, to try to manage one’s days and nights, one’s work, one’s meals, one’s rest.

The percentage of time spent dwelling on other people instead of oneself cannot be very high in the double digits, if that.  This is not an indictment or a judgment.  I think it is literally just about all that people can do.

This is surely why narcissists are always so unhappy.  They can never get as much attention as they wish and imagine they deserve from other people.

We should all probably let go of our sense of entitlement.  The universe “promises” us all one thing and one thing only:  that everything, all this that exists around us, like ourselves, will end.  It may then begin again in some sense, but that doesn’t change the fact that it ended.  Just because there’s another sausage after the link, doesn’t mean the preceding sausage isn’t nevertheless gone.

Wow, that’s a weird analogy or metaphor:  The universe as one sausage in an endless chain of sausage links.

I guess it makes as much sense as many such metaphors, and more sense than some.  I don’t really know what point I was trying to make, if there was one, but at least it ought to be somewhat memorable.  That’s worth something, right?

I’m too tired to contemplate any more at the moment.  I’m going to finish this off now and call it good enough.  I hope you all have a good day (or rather, that each of you has a good day).

But in closing, a thought just occurred to me.  Remember, mushrooms are not vegetables.  As fungi, they are more closely related to your fish and your chicken and your beef (and you) than they are to corn and carrots and peas and potatoes.

Okay, that’s enough.  Please have a good day.

*My gratitude is probably utterly worthless, of course, like my sorrow and regret and disappointment, not to mention my love and my joy and my dreams.

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“…like a ghastly rapid river, through the pale door…”

It’s Monday again.  It keeps doing this, starting a new work week, despite the demonstrated futility of everything.  You’d think that our culture had all read The Myth of Sisyphus as one and had decided to embrace that futility.

But, of course, embracing the absurd and working endlessly and finding happiness in that meaningless repetition is just what the exploiters‒whoever they may be‒would want you to do.  So maybe

But if so, it’s almost certainly an accidental one.

Even true “conspiracies” in the world (which are less common than you’d think) are, I suspect, rarely planned out ahead of time; they simply happen.  Some course or tendency exists that a few alert people, or just lucky people, recognize as something they can exploit for their own gain, and they do, and the process becomes self-reinforcing.  But no one thought it up.  It’s like the nonrandom survival of randomly varying replicators.  Reality is too complex for even very bright minds to create highly complicated and intricate conspiracies ahead of time.

I’ve written about all of this before, and frankly, I’m tired of discussing it right now.  If you’re interested, go find my earlier discussions, here and/or on Iterations of Zero.

Today, I’m not sure what to write about, though.  Nevertheless, I am writing.  I guess the Sisyphus reference comes all too naturally in such situations, doesn’t it?

I don’t really have much to discuss, now that I think about it.  I had a nice evening Friday, albeit too short of one, but otherwise, there’s nothing really going on.  At least, there’s nothing I know of in the world right now that’s of particular interest to me.

Despite the fact that I am coming off a full-length weekend, on which I had a nice Friday evening watching a few Doctor Who episodes with my youngest, I already feel very tired.  I think that’s probably not too related to broad corporeal processes‒though my chronic pain makes even stationary existence exhausting‒but probably has at least something to do with the waning length of daylight as we approach the Winter Solstice (still more than a month away).

I’m definitely a bit susceptible to seasonal affective effects, on top of my tendency toward difficult to treat dysthymia, which I now suspect has always been so difficult to treat because it’s related to my ASD.

Coincidentally‒but not surprisingly‒my first big and particularly recalcitrant depression happened not long after my ASD repair*.  It’s fairly common for patients to suffer from depressive syndromes after having had open heart surgery.  I didn’t know this at the time (I was only 18) but I experienced it firsthand, and I learned all about it later.

I even wrote a review paper about the neurologic side-effects of surgeries that involve heart-lung bypass.

Again, I’ve written about all this crap before; I’m sorry to rehash it.  Please feel free to go hunt down the various mentions of all this in my prior writing here and on IoZ.  If anyone finds any particularly interesting tidbits, feel free to share them and/or the links in the comments, so others might be able to find them more quickly than you did.

I know, I know‒no one is interested in any of that shit, no one is going to look it up, and no one is going to share it.  I’m being patently ridiculous.  But I feel that I must write something, since I’m writing at all.  Thankfully, I’m nearly at the target number of 701 words, so soon I’ll be able to draw this tediousness to a close, at least for today.  It’s too much to hope‒for you, for me, for everybody‒for this to be the last such post for anything other than tragic reasons.

Life is almost always disappointing, though if you don’t expect things‒as the Tao recommends‒you will not be disappointed.

Speaking of expectations not playing out, on the way toward the office this morning, I waited at an intersection where there is a right turn arrow that crosses what would be my route.  Before the walk signal turned, a car turned in front of me, as was appropriate.  Then the signal changed and I had the right of way, so I went.

As I half-expected, a car on its way in went to turn right and had to stop short to avoid plowing straight through me.  I took no evasive action, just muttered to myself, “Hit me, hit me, hit me…” as I walked along.  Alas, the driver did no such thing, so as I continued through the intersection, I looked back at the car and muttered, “Pussy.”

Of course, it was not the car’s fault.  Though capable of motion, it was a fundamentally inanimate object, with no arguable or even fanciful sense of agency.  Its shape made it clear that it was well over a decade old, and it certainly predated any AI drivership, even if it had been the right make and model for such things, which it was not.

It was the driver who was not willing to kill (or even just injure) a random pedestrian who was obeying traffic laws and signals.  I guess that’s actually commendable.

All right, that’s enough of this idiocy for now.  I hope you all had a good weekend and that you will have a truly exceptionally wonderful week‒and then that the exceptional wonderfulness becomes the norm, and all your future weeks become brilliant, but you never become complacent about it; you are always grateful and happy.

I would also like a unicorn pony.

*The heart one, not the neurodevelopmental disorder.  Acronyms really are a potentially treacherous form of data compression, aren’t they?

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“Vainly I had sought to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow…”

Well, it’s Friday at last, and the day I mentioned earlier this week—you know, 11-14-25.  I’m sure you all “got” the slight fun I found in this date, and I’m not going to go into it any farther.  If you’re interested, you could go back and look at that earlier post.

I’m writing this on my lapcom today, for the first time since last week.  It will—or should—be the last post before Monday, because I don’t think we’re going to be working tomorrow.  At least one of our best closers who comes in on weekends when we’re open has a family crisis, and it’s a serious one, so he won’t be coming in, and that means the rest probably wouldn’t find it worthwhile.  If that situation changes, I might write a post, but I doubt it.  The boss himself suggested we won’t be working tomorrow, so there’s a pretty strong inclination in that direction.

I hope to be doing something rather enjoyable at the office after work this evening, but I won’t get into it now.  It’s nothing most of you would probably care about, and many of you might not find it interesting, but I’m looking forward to it.  Hopefully it all goes well.

I did not read any Principles of Neural Science yesterday, nor indeed any of my other science books.  I’m afraid my stomach (or, really, my whole GI tract) was giving me quite a bit of trouble during the day, and so I didn’t really do anything that required any significant focus or imagination.  I hope to read something today—my GI tract appears to be responding to my attempts at remediation—but we shall see.

The GI tract has its own, dedicated sub-nervous system, which by some measures is reputedly at least as sophisticated as a cat’s brain, and mine is pretty clearly about as stubborn and willful as any cat.  I guess I don’t have much right to complain, since I am also rather stubborn and willful, and in some senses catlike*; I’ve got little leg to stand on for complaining.

Let’s see, let’s see, what else should I write about…or, rather, about what else should I write?  I’m really not sure.  I’m trying very hard not to share too many too negative thoughts here, but it’s hard, since that’s a lot of my thoughts.  It also hasn’t seemed to do anything to improve the circulation of this blog.  I have returned to the old numbers of typical daily readers—roughly a few dozen—and if anything the number seems to have shrunk slightly.  I don’t really know what to make of it.

It would be nice to have a wider audience, and especially one that was widening, but I am not good at self-promotion.  It makes me feel very uncomfortable.  That’s largely because of poor self-esteem, I guess.  Or maybe it’s just social anxiety/awkwardness, or just a general sense of rudeness, or ASD, I don’t know for sure.

It would be nice if more people read my blog, though, or listened to my music, or read my books.  I would really love to have people enjoy my creations, and maybe even have a few of them tell me so and tell me what they liked about them—especially the books, of course.

Maybe my work will become popular after I die.  I guess I’ll never know whether that happens, but it’s something onto which I can hold to console myself when next to no one reads anything I write, especially fiction, or listens to my music, or whatever.

I’m at least still trying to keep my posts somewhat short, setting my target now for 701 words as I have for the last week or so.  Indeed, I’m getting pretty close to that number now, already.  I don’t know whether my readers are grateful for the slightly shorter posts, or if they dislike them, or if they are thoroughly indifferent.

I frequently wrestle with just giving up the whole process as a bad bet.  Writing this blog never did seem to improve the sales of my books, which was the whole reason I first started doing it.  It certainly hasn’t helped my mental illnesses; or if it has, I don’t even want to consider what they would have been like without it.

And it certainly hasn’t made my life into anything anyone sane would want to have.  I don’t think even Hill House would want it, and it’s not sane**.  Hell, I’m not entirely sane, myself—whatever that means—and I don’t really want my life, either.

Oh, well, there’s probably nothing I can do.  Maybe I should just stop trying.  I wish I were able simply to give up and let go.  Maybe someday soon I will be so able.  That would be a relief, certainly for me, and maybe for all of you.

I guess it doesn’t really much matter to anyone but me, though, certainly in the relatively long term.

Oh, well.  I hope you all have a very good day and a very good weekend and a very good week after that, and so on and on.

*Not my agility, though.  That’s not horrible, but it’s far from catlike.  And my dexterity leaves even more to be desired, unless I’m paying close attention.  My default state seems to leave me rather disconnected from my body in certain senses, and that tends to lead to a bit of clumsiness.

**So said Shirley Jackson, the author of The Haunting of Hill House, and she has authority.

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How now, you secret, black, and midnight blogs!

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday.  It is, in fact, the 2nd Thursday in November, which means that, from the point of view of Thursdays in November, we are halfway to Thanksgiving (which in the US is the 4th Thursday in November).

Of course, we are not precisely halfway to Thanksgiving from the point of view of the days of the month of November overall.  Thanksgiving falls on the 27th of November this year‒14 days from today, of course‒so we are not quite halfway there as far as the days of November are concerned, but we are close to it.  If the month had started on a Friday, the halfway point in days versus Thursdays would be the same.

I think that the maximum disjunction would happen if the month began on a Thursday.  The 8th would then be the 2nd Thursday, and Thanksgiving would fall on the 22nd, which is quite a bit larger than 2 x 8.

Mind you, all this depends on starting one’s count in November.  That is not too unreasonable, but one could just as sensibly start counting Thursdays right at or after January 1st (let’s see, this year that’s 46/48 Thursdays, or about 95.833%).  If we did that, we would already be practically at Thanksgiving.  If we counted all days, we might be even closer still, percentage-wise.  Let’s see, 317/331, or about 95.770%.  Whataya know?  I was wrong, the Thursday one is “closer”.  I suspect this varies from year to year, but I’m not interested enough to check.

We could also begin our count at the beginning of autumn, which sort of seems appropriate.  Or, perhaps most sensibly still, we could start right after the previous Thanksgiving, beginning our counting on “Black Friday”.

Jeez Louise, I think I’m losing my mind, here.  Why am I writing about such nonsense?  I mean, yes, it’s interesting to notice how arbitrary and artificial human ways of counting days and things and so on are, so I suppose it’s somewhat edifying, and even could be mildly interesting for a moment.  But I nevertheless feel bad for wasting my readers’ time.

Though, I suppose, in a certain sense, one could say that all time is wasted‒“Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines” and all that.

“Where do we come from?  The dust.  Where do we go to?  The grave.”

Of course, that last quote was not meant to be a general description of the human condition, but refers to Ray Bradbury’s “October People” in Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I’ve always thought that I’m an October person, since I was born in October.  Like Macduff, in the play from which Bradbury’s title above is taken, I was a C-section, though it would be a hyperbolic* to say that I was “ripped untimely” from the womb.  (Still, does my manner of birth mean I could defeat Macbeth?)

October is over now, in any case, and who** knows if I shall see another.

I don’t know if anyone has ever written about “November People”, but they don’t sound particularly scary nor particularly inspiring.  This assessment is not meant to refer to people born in November!  Several of my favorite people were born in November.

In other news, I did receive my Principles of Neural Science yesterday.  I used my dollar coins to choose a section, and I read it in the afternoon:  it was about neural firing and muscular activation during locomotion, briefly comparing lamprey with vertebrate, especially mammalian, locomotion patterns.

It may seem trivial, and I didn’t learn much that I didn’t at least implicitly know before, but the specifics are new, and all information has the potential to be useful.  We cannot know for certain ahead of time what knowledge might be most beneficial, just as we cannot predict the specifics of progress and invention.

As I said, I chose the textbook page via my coin-flipping process, using my three Sacagawea coins.  I keep a few dollar coins with Susan B. Anthony and/or the aforementioned Sacagawea with me at all times.

I carry such coins not so much for decision-making but because I like to roll them across my fingers when I want to “stop my hands feeling busy”.  I guess it’s a form of “stimming”, and I’ve been doing that particular one since college.  I taught myself to do it after I saw Val Kilmer, as Chris Knight, doing it in the movie Real Genius, which was one of my favorite movies.

Well, this has been a lot of pointless nonsense today, hasn’t it?  I apologize, and I guess I can try to mitigate my offense by at least trying not to produce too much of nothing***.  So I will draw this post to a close now.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will very likely write a post tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, if it’s the sort of thing to which you look forward.

TTFN

*You know, like non-Euclidean geometry.

**The WHO does not know, though with a bit of background information they could probably make reasonable predictions.

***According to the song, that can make a man feel ill at ease.  It can also, according to the same song, make a man abuse a king, which seems like it would be quite a rare situation.

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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.