Friday Notes (Dec 19, 2025)

I meant to put out a rare early-in-the-month Friday Notes post this time but with one thing and another didn’t start on this until last week (on the very day I meant to post it). It’s true what they say about time passing faster when you’re older. In part because so much becomes known.

Novelty makes life richer — it’s one reason I love and pursue science and math. Endless new vistas to explore; always a new hill to climb.

And always new notes on the pile…

Some years ago, I wrote a post about the perception of time passing. I had for a long time ascribed it to percentages — how a year is 10% of life at ten years but only 2% at 50 years (and just 1% at 100).

Another idea is that time feels slower when there is novelty in life. Novelty is likely highest when we’re infants and everything is new and surprising. Our brains work hard to figure out reality. Over time, more and more becomes familiar. Our brains can relax in “Oh, that again” moments.

[I’ve long suspected a key reason little kids demand the same stories over and over is that it gives them familiarity so their overworked brains can take a breather. Even adults in conditions of constant high novelty can experience overload.]

Yet, I pursue novelty in science and math, as well as in my programming hobby, but as I wrote in that post years ago, “Mondays I often find myself surprised that it’s already laundry day again.” That was five years ago, and it was already a personal cliche.

So, it can’t be entirely down to lack of novelty, though it is true much less is new these days than in my youth. A key reason ordinary fiction doesn’t do much for me is that, in my three score and ten, I’ve learned as much about humanity as I care to. The vistas there seem more limited. Even in biblical times, there was “nothing new under the Sun.”

[A friend who has been in AA for decades has stories about new members who, per the requirement, have hit rock bottom and finally sought help. They come to meetings afraid to speak of what they perceive as their ugly, shocking transgressions. They fear no one will accept them if their worst sins become known. But when they finally open up, the response is invariably, as my friend put it, “Oh, that.” Humans have been the same wonderfully and cruelly inventive angel/beasts for at least 10,000 years.]

But I digress. Percentages may play some role; lack of novelty likely plays a role (perhaps a bigger one). BentleyMom once suggested it has to do with adult preoccupations. Our minds become ever busy with thoughts of work, finances (especially debts), family, pets, weather, and all manner of distracting things. This constant fretting fritters away our day.

I can attest to how mental business compresses time when I’m busy with a project. Or worse, stuck on a debugging problem I can’t seem to fix. A day zips past almost without notice. If debugging, an aggravating day, because project work stops until the bug is fixed, so that quick day seems like lost time. I think adult preoccupations may indeed play a role in our perception of time speeding by.

From a neurophysics point of view, our brains slow down as we age, which makes the minutes, hours, and days seem faster. Most noticeably, our reflexes get worse with age (I’m noticing that in myself lately — I’ve gotten clumsier, which is really annoying).

But I think engagement and preoccupation play bigger roles. Judging time intervals isn’t the sort of task people normally perform, so I take experimental results with a little salt. I only know some days zip past and some days drag. If neuron speed played a significant role, I would expect less difference. (Reflexes in mind, I do drive more carefully, more deliberately, now than I did in my wilder youth.)

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With only four views (so far) this month, it seems the party is truly over for the Babylon (Anime) post from 2021:

Stragglers for months, but even they’ve petered out. The post rose to fourth most visited post, though (as usual) I never learned what the big attraction was.

It was in the #3 slot for much of the year, but Gibbs’ Rules, another post that’s been getting views, passed it. I think the recent uptick in views there might be due to that Tony and Ziva TV show now on (or is it? never seen it). There is also that this blog has gotten significantly more traffic in the last two years than ever before, so it might just be from that.

Regardless, except for the New Year’s wrap up in January, this is almost certainly the last appearance of these charts. I don’t intend to record the daily data beyond the end of the year.

[To be clear, I’m not so obsessed that I record the views daily. Every two weeks or so I call up the WP stats page and transcribe previous days. Just part of many computer housekeeping chores I do regularly. (Backups daily!) But it’s still a PITA, and I won’t mind dropping it.]

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The longer I’m on Substack (coming up on two years now), the less … well, the less I like it. Firstly, it leans hard into being social media. To the dismay of old-timers who viewed it a writer’s corner. Secondly, its subscription model is (understandably) front-and center. Substack is ad-free, so their daily bread comes from taking a percentage of subscriptions to blogs (“newsletters” to make them sound more worth paying for). Thirdly, their Algorithm apparently demands posting frequently — ideally daily — to keep you visible. Fourthly, their software is no better designed or implemented than anyone else’s, and their tech support is essentially non-existent.

All of which are issues for me on one level or another — enough to be the subject of their own post if I ever feel like dumping on Substack — but what’s relevant here is something from the first bullet point above: Substack Notes.

It’s essentially Twitter or one of its many splinters. Short form “blogging”. (But is it really blogging?). At first, I thought it was going to be fun. I’ve never had a Twitter account. Ages ago I had a Facebook page; deleted it after a few years. Over a decade ago, I was on LinkedIn for work, but other than setting up a profile page, I never used it.

[I feel like McCoy. “I’m a blogger damn it!! Not a social media content maker!” I used to have a text file of all the times McCoy complained he was a doctor (damn it) not a bricklayer|magician|captain|whatever.]

It didn’t take long for Substack Notes to both get old and wearying. There was a metaphor for OG internet social media of a big public park filled with people all standing on their own soapboxes proclaiming their views and yelling at others proclaiming theirs.

Short form social media seems like streets filled with various performance artists all demanding attention. Sturgeon’s Law, as always, applies to the miasma (and is perhaps in this case generous).

Bottom line, I’m tapped out on Substack Notes. I’ll save them for Friday Notes posts here where they won’t contribute so much to the noise.

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I can’t remember what brought it to mind (possibly thinking of the song), but I was reminded of (and now want to watch again) Watching the Detectives (2007), a romcom starring Lucy Liu and Cillian Murphy.

It features Murphy as a film geek who owns an independent video rental store, and Liu as the femme fatale who appears one day and utterly disrupts his ordered (and a bit sheltered) life.

One of the takeaways, and what endears it to me, is the notion that character tells in how you treat people who don’t matter to you. A message that seems especially relevant these days. There’s a scene where Murphy engineers a test to see how his current girlfriend treats a waiter who (at Murphy’s instigation and bribe) spills some water on her.

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Notes that will never become Substack Notes:

✍ I’ve come to realize that many people keep lots of open browser tabs. For days, even weeks. And now I understand why MS Edge (and I assume other browsers) semi-disable tabs that have been dormant for a while.

I’m on the other end, often closing tabs I end up needing to reopen. (Same with Explorer windows.) When I put my laptop in Sleep mode every night, all browser windows, let alone tabs, are closed.

✍ I look forward to window focus following my line of sight so that when I shift from one window to another (forgetting to Alt+Tab or mouse-click to change focus), I end up not typing in the wrong window.

I’ve been using computers since the late 1970s, so I have adequate keyboard skills and use lots of keyboard shortcuts to keep my fingers on the keys (it breaks my physical flow using the cursor keys, let alone mousing).

The goal for truly intelligent computers: do what I meant, not what I said.

✍ Is there a correlation between an early belief in Santa Claus and being a big fan of horror? I don’t mean people who are fine with it, I mean fans who consume it as much or more than other fare. (As how science fiction comprises a lion’s share of my reading and viewing.)

Romances, musicals, period pieces, not my flavors, but it’s easier for me to see why people like them than it is with horror, at least as a major part of one’s story-consuming diet. Different strokes; no judgement.

✍ That learning a new word and then hearing it a lot thing illustrates how much we filter out. Those new words were always there but were ignored because they were unknown (so long as the overall communication seemed clear).

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Cat Scan

Do you know the one about the dead duck? It’s related; trust me.

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My sister is a few years younger than I, and a constant of our life was fairness. It mainly involved fair shares of anything and everything but could extend to getting a small consolation gift on the other’s birthday. Equality and fairness (in nearly everything) were central ethics in my upbringing. They still are values I hold in high regard.

Once upon a time, I was in a high school civics class taking an important test. The teach was called to the office for some important thing and left the class alone taking the test. Two students went to the teacher’s desk, rummaged through it, and found the test answer key. Which was passed around the room.

When it came to me, I just passed it to the next person without looking at it. Not cheating was too deeply ingrained. (And I felt okay with the class material. The test wasn’t a threat.) I wasn’t alone in that by any stretch, but many copied the answers. Multiple choice (which was why it wasn’t much of a threat), so the answers were easy to copy.

If you have a strong sense of narrative imperative, you may have spotted the oncoming train.

The call to the office was a fake; the answer key was a plant; those who blindly copied it both failed the test and got wrist-slaps. And it was obvious because the fake answers were very wrong.

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And now the weather:

November had that cold notch on the 9th but came back with that +70° peak on the 14th (40° difference in five days). Then, like the harbinger of winter it is, at the end of the month it snowed and got cold.

In fact, in the context of Novembers since 2013, that notch represents an unseasonably low high for the day. The peak is a record-breaking high. And the way the daily highs decline at month’s end is on the low end of past seasons.

[I really need to get around to making some charts showing averages. There’s a Substack blog I follow that does a lot of interesting weather charts I’d like to try to emulate. Weather, especially graphically presented, is a long-time fascination.]

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If you’ve ever wondered (or needed to know):

• Small Cat (2 kg): ~1.0×10²⁶ atoms
• Average Cat (4 kg): ~2.0×10²⁶ atoms
• Large Cat (8 kg): ~4.0×10²⁶ atoms

As a reference, assuming 10¹¹ stars in a galaxy and 10¹¹ galaxies in the visible universe, there are a mere 10²² stars in the visible universe.

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It’s getting to be habit for Bentley to make an appearance in these, but it’s a nice habit. The world needs more pictures of dogs:

Working on her suntan to keep that nice brown shade (though she’s going white around the edges these days).

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I’m not 70. I’m 18 with 52 years experience!

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

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