Friday Notes (Jul 28, 2023)

It has been almost four weeks since my last blog post. I decided to take something of a vacation to celebrate various anniversaries (the blog, 12 years; retirement, 10 years; buying this condo, 20 years). And to celebrate finally getting some long-standing tasks off my TODO list (such as finally making a will).

Being retired puts a new spin on vacations, though. Being retired is vacation: your hard-earned, well-deserved permanent vacation. How does one take a vacation from a vacation?

Regardless, today is the last chance for a July edition of Friday Notes, so vacation-vacation is over, and it’s back to just being on vacation.

The answer to the question just posed, of course, is that one does something else, possibly going somewhere else. Same as always. It’s about taking a break from all your worries (sure would help a lot; wouldn’t you like to get away? …).

Sorry, started re-watching Cheers during vacation-vacation. I mean it’s about taking a break from whatever it is one does normally and doing something else. For a change.

But, at least for me, writing is like running. When I stop, I lose the edge, and it’s hard to get back up to speed. The longer the pause, the harder it is. It gets easier and easier to keep blowing it off.

[I can’t recall who said this, and I think this may apply to many writers, but there is the notion that writing every day is a primary goal. Some even set a specific amount to write every day.]

There is also that — as always — I find myself questioning whether blogging is worth it. I have growing issues with WordPress software, long-form blogging seems obsolete, and I’m fighting an increasing sense of ennui about it all. But when I find myself making (yet more) notes for blog posts… well, it’s time to get back into the saddle.

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Speaking of notes, this Friday Notes series has been instrumental in reducing my note mountain to a note molehill. My WordPress Drafts folder is smaller than ever — only six drafts, and three of those are templates I use for creating new posts.

The first half of 2023 has, in general, been a productive period for me. I mentioned the long-standing TODO list items (for example finally getting new glasses). It’s nice to get those done at long last. What’s depressing is that the list never ends. Part of the July vacation-vacation was, I think, a reaction to, on the one hand, getting a bunch of stuff done, but on the other, still having a bunch of stuff to get done.

New glasses! (Also, Tina Lee Forsee’s new book!)

One of my worst aspects: I’m really (really!) bad at chores. And I’m a world-class procrastinator. A big part of it is that I hate repetition. When I go for a walk, I try to make it a loop rather than taking a path some distance and then turning around and taking the same path back.

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It’s common knowledge that (fictional) Superman lives in (equally fictional) Metropolis and that his pal (also fictional) Batman lives in (likewise fictional) Gotham City. And it’s always seemed clear those were two different cities, not just in name, but in character.

Growing up, I saw Metropolis as an analog of New York City and Gotham City as an analog of Chicago. To me, gangsters seemed more a part of Batman’s ethos than Superman’s, and I associate gangsters with Chicago. And somewhere along the line I got the impression Gotham City was not on a seacoast whereas Metropolis was.

[Back in the day, the location of these cities was fairly ambiguous. More recent versions of the comics (circa 1977 and on) seem to put Gotham in New Jersey (as a coastal city). Metropolis continues to be probably New York City. Or a city in Delaware across the bay from Gotham. A recent DC movie actually showed them as two cities separated by a river. And apparently, there is a long history in the comics of the two being within driving distance.]

One problem is that “Gotham” has long been a nickname for New York City. (Washington Irving coined the phrase in 1807, taking the name from the village of Gotham, Nottinghamshire, England, which according to folklore, was a village of supposed fools.)

Further, Batman’s city has long been depicted as similar to an older, darker New York. But then what is Metropolis? It’s obviously a major city. Its name and character suggest it’s the major city. Superman’s city. Seems that should be New York City.

This has long bugged me. It’s almost as if Batman’s city is old New York at night whereas Superman’s city is modern New York by day.

In any event, bravo to DC for creating two such memorable yet different superheroes. Almost literally night-and-day different.

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Between college and going to work for The Company I spent three years working with my dad in his one-man print shop, Potpourri Printers. (With me there, it was a two-man shop.)

My dad’s print shop (with his car parked in front).

My dad had a specialty job shop for small businesses. Printing and design. A lot of custom letterhead and envelopes, but also newsletters and advertising. I did the photographic work as well as a lot of the color printing stuff. We even published some vanity books for some local authors (one was a photography book for an old woman who’d been a photographer most of her life; another was a humorous illustrated compendium of myths about determining (or controlling!) the sex of your unborn child).

One repeating job involved a sales sheet from a wholesaler of inexpensive rings. The sheet had little pictures of each ring that could be ordered, so the job spec came with a shipment of rings I had to photograph. Product photography has different demands compared to most picture taking. For example, the rings had to be inside a small tent we made to control reflections, and they had to be stood upright (on little bits of clay).

More to the point, we had to buy a macro lens for the camera to do such close work with small objects. And even more to the point, with that macro lens I took a close-up of some of the gears on my dad’s printing press:

Gears! [click for a big version]

It was an interesting time. Fun working with dad, and I got to exercise my creative muscle.

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Had a pair of dreams that entertained me enough that I made some notes as soon as I woke up from the second one:

Dream 1: Something about Disneyworld. And crowds. And stairs. (Might be related to having read not one but two SF Cory Doctorow novels that are set there.)

Woke up; grinned; went back to sleep.

Dream 2: Something about being a spy on a mission to stop a train carrying a Big Bad Weapon. We were supposed to shoot train with a bazooka. But we failed to shoot first one. Then there was a second train, but I chose not to shoot thinking, why? The Big Bad Weapon was on first one.

Debriefed by big blond woman in her home with family around. They were planning on moving soon. She told a story about her son; something about not coughing in airports. Then there was a discussion about gravity and plants.

She was going to pay me for the mission. (She was sitting in the sink behind a plastic shield shucking corn?!) I objected we’d failed the primary objective. She agreed and was starting to tell me why we’d actually succeeded on the overall mission when I woke up.

I have the most interesting dreams…

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I have a leftover note from my 50 Words for Snow post last August. Or rather, I wish it was a note and not just this (hand-drawn in the original) diagram:

Neat… If only I remembered exactly what I meant!

Because now, almost a year later, I’m not sure exactly what it means or what connection it had with that post. (Perhaps none, which is why it’s a leftover. I couldn’t fit it in.)

I think it came from pondering the difference between truth, lies, and fiction. The first two come from the “Real World”™ and the last from our imagination. It gets complicated because lies are fictions, but fictions based closely on facts. Stories, on the other hand, might be closely based on life (in which case they’re often tall tales), or they can have little or no connection with our reality. Stories are not bound by plausibility; lies are.

In philosophy there are two fundamental and largely exclusive metaphysical positions: realism and idealism. The former is the view the universe exists without needing or necessarily even acknowledging human consciousness. Our beliefs have no impact on reality. The latter is essentially the opposite view, that our beliefs control or even create reality. I am decidedly not sympathetic to this point of view.

[A softer (saner!) form of idealism focuses on how the only reality we can ever know is the one in our minds and doesn’t say much about external reality (if any). Kant’s transcendental idealism is of this form. Kant was in other regards a realist.]

Anti-realism is the view that external reality is irrelevant or inaccessible or meaningless. It may be real, but it’s out of reach, so there’s no point in trying. All that matters is the internal logic and consistency of a premise. Instrumentalism, the scientific view that defines reality only in terms of what our instruments can measure, is an anti-realist view. (I’m not terribly sympathetic to anti-realism, either, especially with regard to quantum mechanics. I’m a pretty staunch realist.)

So, I think I was making a connection between how anti-realism combines realism and the softer form of idealism to create a kind of agnostic metaphysics versus how fiction combines facts and lies to create abstract truths.

The “benzene snake ring” note is my own long-standing counterargument — my “yeah, but” — to my denial of idealism. It refers to the possibility apocryphal story about how German chemist August Kekulé dreamed about a snake eating its tail and that gave him the idea for the benzene ring molecular structure. Ever since high school I’ve wondered if Kekulé’s dream might have created the reality. What if reality is merely what we’ve all agreed it is? Could supernatural things have existed in our early history because most people believed they could? Did our scientific view of reality as a machine actually change the nature of things?

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Speaking of mechanistic scientific view, did Copernicus (and Descartes and Newton) destroy our sense of responsibility? (Also of entitlement, so there’s that.) Because we’re so sure we’re not unique or special, do we not respect what we represent?

Maybe we should see ourselves as more important in the scheme of things and act accordingly.

The phrase “one hundred billion” applies at three very different scales: brains, galaxies, and the universe. The human brain has about one hundred billion neurons; our galaxy has about one hundred billion stars; and there are (at least) one hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe (probably many more; Hubble has counted one hundred billion).

One hundred billion is 10¹¹. One hundred billion stars in one hundred billion galaxies is 10¹¹ × 10¹¹ = 10²². Keep that number in mind. It’s a one followed by twenty-two zeros.

If we accept the Five-Events thesis — that at least five events with odds of at least one in 10,000 (10⁴) are necessary for intelligent life (see: Are We Special? and Simple Probabilities) — then the odds of intelligent life are at least one in (10⁴)⁵ = 10²°. Easily much higher: requiring six 10⁴ events makes it 10²⁴.

But note how, on these simple odds alone, it may take an entire visible universe of galaxies of stars to provide enough dice rolls to come up with the Yahtzee of an intelligent species (us). We may be one of the most special things the universe has ever created.

Maybe we should try to act like it?

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Stay intelligent, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.

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