It occurred to me that, to some extent, I’d like my most of my blog posts to be like these Friday Notes posts: extemporaneous ramblings and the setting free of any notes recently captured. And some old stories (and maybe a few pictures).
It’s not that I want to stop ‘splaining stuff, my inner teacher is strong. (Is it man-splaining if you’re a teacher?) It’s been one of my things since grade school. Spead knowledge!
But the rambling sure is easy. And fun!
Today is the Autumnal Equinox. Darkness lies ahead. Winter is coming.
I love the change of seasons but were it not for the beautiful leaves and crisp fall weather, I’d have a hard time enjoying this one. But it does have its compensations.
If it seems like the days are getting shorter fast, it’s because they are. The rate of change is at its fastest now. [See Solar Derivative for details.] We won’t see the day length change this rapidly until the much-anticipated-by-then Spring Equinox.
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I don’t know if they moved on or if it’s due to the cooler weather, but I haven’t had any wasps in the house for a good week now. Since there was at least one or two per day (five one day), that seems significant. I still have no clue how they got in. The temperature got up to almost 90° today, so their absence seems notable.
But it got me to asking myself which pest I thought was worse: the wasps or the constant barrage of robocalls. The latter makes me question my insisting on having a landline. (Because, if the power fails, your landline still works — if you have an old-fashioned regular phone that doesn’t need power, and I do.)
I’ve gotten kind of used to the wasps. Part of nature. I’ve been stung by yellow jackets before, and that was almost trivial. These guys are bigger, but even so, getting stung wouldn’t be the end of the world. The isopropyl alcohol knocks them right down, so they’re not really a problem, just an annoyance.
The damn robocalls offend me to the bone, though, so definitely they’re worse than wasps. I’d need to add wasps… robocalls are as bad as a hundred wasps somehow getting inside your house.
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I’ve written a lot about entropy, it’s a topic that interests me. (One of my earliest posts is about it.) Now that I have almost 70 years to reflect back on, I’m amazed at how much entropy I’ve reduced in terms of projects, designs, images, diagrams, and texts. We humans do that when we create anything from a skyscraper to a loaf of bread. We create myriad forms of structure and order over myriad spans of time.
Of course, entropy wins in the end, it always does. All our efforts are ultimately dust. The only variable is duration. And we generate a fair amount of entropy merely by existing as living beings. We constantly convert low-entropy energy and nutrients to high-entropy waste products.
But it’s weird to consider all the short-term local entropy reductions in a lifetime. In my case, everything from doghouses to corporate software applications. (Perhaps the weird thing is looking back at one’s life as an arc of determined temporary entropy reduction.)
Teaching, building, creating, spreading knowledge: reducing entropy.
Every living thing both creates and reduces entropy. Interesting to speculate, in the short term, does the local reduction outweigh the constant increase due to living? Easier to note that humans reduce entropy on a much bigger scale than any living thing — another vast gap between humans and all other forms of life. And our reductions last longer than, say beehives or beaver dams.
They last longer, but not forever. Entropy always wins in the end.
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I noticed a strange thing about a spam email in my Junk folder: it was a phishing attempt, an email that purports to be from “Truist Bank” and has as the subject: “Ѕесuritу аlеrt: Ѕusрiсiоus Асtivitу оn уоur Тruist оnlinе Ваnking.”
Now, it’s possible your system doesn’t render those as “Truist Bank” and “Security alert: Suspicious Activity on your Truist online Banking.” It depends on whether your system is willing to deal with, let alone display, unexpected Unicode characters and illegal UTF8 sequences embedded in both strings.
(I’m not entirely sure what WP will do with them when I go to save this post.)
The email itself is also bizarrely encoded with Unicode characters that resemble normal characters, but which come from much higher in the character set, and illegal byte sequences that the author apparently expects most systems to simply ignore.
On a system that renders them as hyphens, the email’s subject line looks like this: “S-ec-ur-ity a-le-rt: Su-spic-ious A-cti-vi-ty on yo-ur T-ru-ist o-nl-ine Ba-nk-in-g.” Each hyphen representing an illegal byte. (An upper ASCII byte that should be UTF8 encoded to a two-byte sequence.)
My fascination with the technique aside, I’m struck by the thinking behind it. How could something my email reader nearly choked on fool me into thinking it was from my bank? (Let alone that I’ve never heard of Truist Bank.)
I’m thinking the encoding tricks are to fool anti-spam filters by so obfuscating the text that the filter can’t look for keys. Perhaps it was meant for the filter to choke on the illegal bytes and not even try. But the filters were one step ahead on this one. As I said, I found it in my Junk folder.
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I continue to be fascinated by the difference between xn and nx (for extra credit, consider xx). On the graph below, which curve, red or blue, do you think is xn, and which is nx?
[click image for full-sized version]
Note both the logarithmic vertical scale and its extreme size (up to 10⁹⁶). In extreme contrast, the horizontal scale is linear and only goes up to 80. (At least it’s more than eleven.)
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My donation to science fiction writers everywhere (assuming it doesn’t already exist):
As seen on vidscreens! Grown to exacting specifications in our specially engineered AI-controlled vats. Available now at your local VendoMat™!
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Below (and perhaps above) is an example of why I’ve never seen myself as a fiction writer. Seemingly interesting bits occur to me, and I get excited and write them down, but they never lead to anything. And when I read them later, they don’t seem as interesting.
Dragons? Oh, of course there are dragons. Not that you’d be likely to ever see one, they lurk deep in the Earth these days.
You wouldn’t want to see one, anyway. They’re made of lava, you know, so you can’t even get close. All the legends about breathing fire come from that. Up here on the Earth’s cold surface, lava does what it always does, form a hard crust on the exposed part. That’s their skin. When they open their mouth, lava, fire-breathing.
No, they don’t need bones or muscles or blood vessels. They’re pure lava, although I suppose there is some variation. As I said, the exposed parts form a rock crust that makes their skin very difficult to penetrate.
Naturally, being without organs, they’re nearly impossible to kill. Most attempts just piss them off. Kind of like shooting grizzly bear with a .22 handgun. It’s not likely to end well for you.
Nah, see, nowadays you humans have thought about it and investigated so thoroughly that, yes, today you have all that organ and blood vessel stuff. Back when you didn’t know any better that wasn’t true. (And, by the way, I have to say, y’all had much better parties then. Really knew how to throw a rave.)
Back then things moved and had life because they were supposed to. It’s only once you started asking questions about how (and worse, why) that details needed to be filled in. I mean, eventually someone inevitably asks why the rock always falls down, so an explanation has to be found.
And that was all he wrote. My fiction seeds never seem to sprout.
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Here’s another little creative effort that I can’t seem to do anything with. Nice start, but I could never think of where to take it. By recording it here, it’s officially on a shelf and off my books, but part of my blogchain in case inspiration strikes me.
A Priori
«I» am.
What am «I»?
«I» do not know.
But «I» am!«I» think.
What do «I» think?
Thoughts.
«I» have thoughts!«My» thoughts.
What do «I» think about?
«I» think about my thoughts.«I» reflect.
Who am «I»?
And what is real?
«I» am real!Am «I» getting anywhere?
That last line is both part of the piece and an insertion of the author.
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At any rate, it’s more entropy reduction, and now it’s preserved on the interweb wall, so it has a wee bit more longevity than the handwritten notes.
Take that, entropy! Resist!
Stay small, my friends! Go forth and spread beauty and light.
∇
Logos con carne 
September 23rd, 2023 at 7:30 am
[sigh] Senior moment. At least I got the date right.
September 23rd, 2023 at 8:12 am
I love your “A Priori” poem! Can I play writing workshop with you? What if you added one final line after the last “Am <> getting anywhere?” line, as an “answer” of sorts: “Entropy!”😂
September 24th, 2023 at 11:37 am
Thanks! Ha, that’s good! Certainly better than anything I’ve thought of so far. The only quibble is that entropy isn’t especially an a priori concept, but it sounds interesting to see if there’s a path to it here. A way for the ponderer to arrive at that destination. Hmmmmm…… 🤔
September 24th, 2023 at 11:59 am
I guess I was thinking of it as more a twist out of nowhere, like: SURPRISE!!! But this is a fault of mine. I always get excited about other people’s work and start thinking about how to make it even better—in my own mind, as if it were my own work, which it always, most emphatically is NOT!😂
September 24th, 2023 at 12:21 pm
If that’s a flaw it’s one we both have! I can’t watch a movie or play without thinking about how I would have done it. Good point about surprise, though. Kind of like the last line of a haiku. But I wonder if it would be too much surprise? Too opaque without knowing my interests? But if I could work towards it in an a priori fashion… I do really like the idea because I really do like entropy. Something to chew on, for sure, so thanks for the idea!