Month: January 2023

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones by James Clear – A Book Review

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This won’t be a normal book review.  First of all, I haven’t finished reading it yet.  And it’s way too soon to say exactly what results I’ve achieved by using its advice because I really haven’t used any yet.

But what I can tell you is that the author, James Clear’s explanation of his strategies to allow people to break bad habits and make good habits, jibes remarkably well with my long, very checkered career of developing better habits for just about every aspect of my life.  It’s as if this book was written specifically for people like me.  And by people like me what I mean is extremely lazy people with an awful work ethic.

There are chapters on the psychological and neurological origins of habit formation and there are rules for optimizing good habits and rules for minimizing the temptations of bad habits (which tend to be mirror images of each other).  And there are checklists for scheduling all the good activities you will want to piggyback on each other in the course of your new, improved, productive but quite crowded day.

The book doesn’t have a large component of feel-good cheerleading.  It’s more of a how-to manual for maximizing success and minimize relapses.  And it isn’t one of those systems that depend on heroic willpower and any external products.  He’s not selling anything that I’ve read about so far.  It’s logical strategies to manipulate human nature to direct effort and provide support for the natural power of repetition and the application of small incremental change over time.

I think the reason I’ve been enthusiastic about this book is because it formulates things, I’ve already recognized about behavioral modification, but underpins it with explanations about what additional steps can be taken to protect against the everyday problems that so often derail people from making changes to their habits.

I don’t want to sound too enthusiastic about the usefulness of this book for everyone.  Possibly I am the poster child for this book.  Maybe most people don’t need to know about dopamine in order to institute a permanent habit for exercise or rework their schedules.  But for whatever reason this book clicks for me.  If you’re in a self-improvement mode and need a textbook to set it up this might be just what you need.  It’s probably in a library near you so you can check it out and see if it works for you.

21JAN2023 – A Little Country Music for This Afternoon

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I’m a fan of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s music.  I really don’t know anything about the musicians; their politics, ethics or personal stories.  I discovered them quite late in life.  But I like some of their music.

 

 

Will the Woke World Eventually Crash of its Own Accord?

photog Current Events

Rumors of the imminent crash of the woke world have been circulating for millennia.  Plato records Socrates bemoaning the bad manners and laziness of young Athenians.  Well, they did lose the Peloponnesian War so maybe that’s not a good example.  But it does seem like the demise of our declining civilization is taking an inordinately long time to happen.

But I think I’ve identified a reliable harbinger of the apocalypse:

Somebody paid millions of dollars to create this thing to honor Martin Luther King in Boston.  This is not a trivial thing.  The hoops you need to go through to get the funds, allocate the public space, get all the regulatory requirement approved and get all the warring factions of the woke coalition lined up is anything but easy.  Now imagine they did all this and still didn’t look at this abstract sculpture carefully from all directions to see what it would look like.

These people are either profoundly stupid or mentally ill.  Or they’re both.  Of course what does that say about us that we’re being run into the ground by them?

Truly we’ve reached a point in our civilization where the only hope is for some locality to break entirely away from this sick depraved global mess and try to restore a sane healthy human community.

I guess that’s the quadrillion dollar question; will it happen?  Well, I’ve got something around twenty years left on this planet (more or less) and I’m very interested to see the outcome.  If it begins to look like some place, maybe a US red state, starts accomplishing this revolution I’ll advocate vigorously for my descendants to migrate to that place.  But I can tell you unequivocally that it won’t be Boston.  These must be the most hopelessly myopic people on the face of the Earth.  They should be mercilessly mocked by everyone over this for as long as it takes for that absurd statue to be torn down and melted down to make maritime hardware or something at least useful.

The Further Adventures of Hard Boiled, Two-Fisted Joe Biden – Episode II – Second Thoughts

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Everyone’s favorite Haitian lesbian kewpie doll finishes off her White House press conference with the five hundredth repetition of, “Ask the White House Counsel’s office about the classified documents found in the bucket at the end of the rope in the waters of Chesapeake Bay at the end of the pier next to Hunter’s condo.  We are following a process and it does not include me answering annoying and unnecessary questions.”

As she leaves the podium Jumpin’ Joe Biden shuffles up to the microphone and greets the White House Press Corp with a flash of his bionic choppers and a bubbly “I’ve got this” lack of concern.

When the Fox News reporter attempts to ask the octogenarian denizen of the West Wing about the seventeenth classified document cache discovered that morning, Biden raises his arms as if to fend off the question and starts talking, “Now hold on, hold on.  People have been talking behind my back about how the Deep State is turning against me and wants me to resign.  Well, fat chance.

The American people aren’t interested in these documents.  The documents are classified.  Classified!  That means they’re secret.  Americans aren’t allowed to know what’s in them.  So obviously I’m not going to talk about them.  Good Americans won’t want to know about them.  That’s just common sense.  So that means that those Americans who want to know about these documents are bad Americans.  Bad!  And bad Americans are what we’ve been fighting against since I took office in 2021.

They attacked our democracy on January 6th and thousands of Capitol police officers were slaughtered and millions of IRS agents were killed in the suitcase nuke they unleashed.  Or almost unleashed.  Because I was there to save them.  I threw myself on the suitcase and absorbed the full blast.  This temporarily neutralized my super strength and x-ray vision but later on those powers came back.

And that brings me to what I really want to talk about today.  The Second Amendment.  Or rather the myth of the Second Amendment.  A lot of trouble makers have been telling people that the Constitution includes a right to bear arms.  Well, this seemed very strange to me so I had top men looking into this.  J Edgar Hoover, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who isn’t a man but could be if she decides she wants to be one.  And they’ve reported back that it’s just not true.  When they went back to the original copy of the Constitution there was an asterisk in invisible ink next to the Second Amendment that can only be seen using Ben Franklin’s bifocals, and that leads to an equally invisible footnote that says, “Amendment deleted due to Consumer Safety concerns and environmental effects of gun powder.”  True story!

So effective immediately we’ll be rounding up all those illegal guns.  And hopefully none of these illegal gun owners will get any funny ideas about resisting.  You know an AR-15 isn’t exactly an F-15.  And a 30-megaton thermonuclear ICBM trumps a protest march six ways from Sunday.  Now I’ve got to run because the local Catholic girls’ middle school is presenting me with a plaque that says “World’s Greatest President” and I’ve heard they all have great shampoo choices there.  True story!”

Biden walks confusedly away from the podium and is intercepted by Dr. Jill who gives him his juice box and leads him toward the Oval Office for his 10 am full body blood replacement and electroshock therapy.  The White House Press Corp stare helplessly at each other and dejectedly update their resumes.

Trans-Planckian Problems with Hawking Radiation in Evaporating Black Holes

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https://orionscoldfire.com/index.php/2020/02/14/behold-arrokoth-the-jeb-bush-of-the-solar-system/

 

Good golly Miss Molly!  I was reading an article about the highest possible energies that a particle accelerator could accelerate a proton to and the author started throwing around terms like the Planck energy and the Planck distance and pretty soon it was Planck this and Planck that and Planck the other thing.  Now I dimly remembered that expressing a physical measurement in terms of its Planck equivalent was a way of normalizing the units so that the fundamental constants like the speed of light; c and the gravitational constant; G were rendered as unity in these measurements and thus the Planck units were the fundamental expressions for these concepts.  But I never remembered what sizes these Planck versions came out to.

So, I looked them up in Wikipedia (of course):

 

Table 1: Modern values for Planck’s original choice of quantities
Name Dimension   Value (SI units)
Planck length length (L) 1.616255(18)×10−35 m
Planck mass mass (M) 2.176434(24)×10−8 kg
Planck time time (T) 5.391247(60)×10−44 s
Planck temperature temperature (Θ) 1.416784(16)×1032 K

Now the Planck mass is a perfectly ordinary number.  10−8 kg is quite a large number compared to the mass of a proton or a neutron.  But look at the Planck time; 10−44 s or Planck temperature; 1032 K.  What exactly does 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 degrees K even mean?  What would the velocity of the atoms at that temperature be?  Would they be traveling at 0.99999999999999999999999999999999 of the speed of light?

So, I shake off this feeling that I’ve entered the silly season and read on.  Apparently at these Planck conditions the gravitational force becomes equivalent to the stronger forces like electromagnetism and the nuclear strong force and that allows for “interesting” effects.  Reading on into this miasma of confusing ideas I gathered that these Planck units were considered the limits of these measurements.  In other words, trying to define a time period less than 10−44 seconds was meaningless in our quantum system.  And possibly temperatures above the Planck temperature would just create micro-black holes.

Pretty soon they were talking about how evaporating black holes run into problems with these “trans-Planckian” conditions and pretty soon I was experiencing full blown transphobia.  After all, when I had first read about evaporating black holes back before fake news it had sounded kind of bogus to me.  Stephen Hawking was one of those characters from the world of science that seems to approach the edges of science fiction.  A man with a super genius intellect trapped in an almost completely disabled body who can only move a couple of his fingers and can only communicate with the world via the most painfully slow interface imaginable.  If it turns out Hawking is mistaken about evaporating blackholes I’m sure the world will cut him some slack.  Other than a few physics PhD’s that might get yanked, I’m pretty sure that the practical damages from evaporating black holes getting blown out of the water will be pretty close to 10−44 dollars.

And speaking of which have we finally found the limits of US federal spending?  If Dopey Joe Biden tries to print more than 1 Planck dollars will Washington DC be ripped right out of space time and returned to Cthulhu’s dimension where the Democrats came from?  Boy I hope so.

And We Keep Getting Richer but We Can’t Get Our Picture

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A photog’s work is never done.  Today one of the many hats I had to wear was Camera Girl’s chauffer.  It seems her car had to go in the shop for a couple of grand worth of maintenance and repairs.  So, I followed her to the garage and drove her home.  Then at the end of the day, the reverse trip.  I mean, what does she think I am, an Uber driver?    And then there was this and that and the other thing and before you know it my whole day, twenty-four precious hours are gone, gone for good!  Well, c’est la guerre.

I was reading a “Rolling Stone” article about the Republican House planning a series of investigations and how unhinged they all were.  Mercy sakes, why would anyone investigate the federal government’s response to COVID?  I mean why would locking down the whole country and forcing experimental drugs into the whole population be grounds for inquiry.  Seems perfectly normal to me.

In addition, this unhappy “journalist caterwauled about investigations into the Disinformation Governance Board, Eric Swalwell’s Chinese Spy, the FBI chasing parents at School Board meetings, the government hiring 87,000 IRS agents and the fed’s collusion with Big Tech to censor conservatives.  I mean I just felt so bad for the feds.  How awful to accuse them of unconstitutional overreach.  Really it was just good old American overachievement.

I really feel this writer’s pain.  She knows how hard it was for the January 6th investigation to get anyone to listen to their hearings and realizes it was because of how boring they were.  Whereas with the Hunter Biden laptop filled to overflowing with videos of hookers and crack smoking it will be impossible to keep it from streaming everywhere.  It’s just too unjust for the evil Republicans to have all this good stuff to work with.  There should be some kind of equity, inclusion and diversity.  Maybe some of the footage can be doctored to include Republicans in the crack house scenes with Hunter.  Maybe for the sake of diversity some of the hookers can be switched out for adults instead of the actual underage sex workers.  And for equity’s sake maybe the “big guy” could be Donald Trump this time.  Isn’t reality so unfair?

You know, it’s funny.  Back in the 1960s and 70s people used to read the Rolling Stone to be entertained.  They’d read about Led Zeppelin, or Queen and find out whether the new album was coming out and whether it was any good.  I’m trying to imagine who reads it now and why.  The lefties reading it back then would have been horrified if the writers were defending some government program forcing people to be injected with drugs they didn’t want.  Or imagine trying to defend the FBI silencing free speech.

Well, the good news is that probably no one reads it at all anymore.  Think about it, I may be the only actual human to have read that drivel.  Millions of bots clicked on the link but I’m the only idiot who slogged through that crap.  Well, my takeaway is that the House Republicans are giving me my money’s worth.  Outraging Rolling Stone writers and embarrassing deep state fascists is the only worthwhile occupation for politicians.  I take that back.  They can also prevent Congress from appropriating any more money.  Now that is worthwhile.

Groovy man.