Some random thoughts because I don't really even want to think about what's going on in the world

1. We say we "dreamed up" a good idea, like the design for a house or something. Or even a melody. What if it's literally true, that we do most of our important creative thought while dreaming, asleep? I think this is so. 

2. No doubt English spelling is weird. Noah Webster tried to make it rational in the days before formal linguistics, and many others have as well. One of its desirable features, especially in this brief era when we still use keyboards (don't think they're on the way out? They are)... is that it, almost without exception, eschews diacritical marks of all kinds. You know, accents, circumflexes, "umlauts," etc. (Banish forever as if it never existed the abominable spelling coöperation, which was actually in vogue to some extent in my lifetime). But here's the thing. English has a lot of sounds. Not necessarily phonemic, but at least some of them are represented in our spelling and it makes it easier to read the language. A minor example that occurred to me. We could think, perhaps, we'll reform spelling by using a series of digraphs, some for vowels and others, most of which we already use, for single sounds not served by any letter. Like the tch in match, which is actually a trigraph. A common one, which seems to be a diphthong, is the ie in tied. So let's replace it with a more logical representation, ai, and get taid. But what about priest? No one says praist (anymore, anyway), so we replace that one with, what? ii for "long i (ee)"? Maybe. But let's focus on the original diphthong. What about dyed? Past tense of "to dye," which seems to be the exact same sound as died, past tense of to die? Or pried, the past tense of to pry. And the same vowel as pride, which isn't a past tense at all. He we get into to a little trouble. I think die and dye are actual homonyms, so the spelling is just a graphical marker. But, I'm no linguist, but I think I hear a difference between pried, in he pried of the bottlecap, and pride, as in he was filled with pride. Say them in sequence. Pried has the slightest hint of a landing on the d where pride does not. See if you don't think so. Somehow praid for both would be an impoverishment, not an improvement. 

3. For my last random thought this morning, I'll share a dialog I had with the Great and Glorious God Chatgipiti. 

Me: "I tried to ask your nemesis, the Amazon AI, about this, but it wouldn't let me finish my question, so hopefully you will. Given that the Earth-Moon system is an anomaly because it was caused by the collision of two planet-sized bodies early in the history of the solar system, I'm wondering if we can derive from what little we know about the moons of exoplanets and what we know about the rest of the solar system to come up with a rule of thumb about terrestrial planets that may hold throughout the universe, more or less. And that would be the following (the moons of Mars being also an exception because they appear to be captured asteroids: from the other terrestrial planets in the solar system, which appear to be more typical, we could come to the conclusion that most terrestrial planets do not have moons. What do you say to that?

Here was its answer (it only thought for 17 sec., sometimes I get it thinking for a minute or more): 

Your proposed "rule of thumb" is pointing in a reasonable direction, but it needs two big caveats: (1) we still have essentially zero direct observational leverage on moons of terrestrial exoplanets, and (2) our own Solar System is a tiny sample, and it's "selection-biased" in the sense that we're sitting on the one terrestrial planet with a conspicuously large moon.

On the observational side: as of early 2026, no exomoon has been unambiguously confirmed, despite several candidates and a lot of effort. That matters because it means we cannot yet say, from data, whether "most rocky planets have no moons" is true in the broader galaxy. The non-detections so far are not very informative for terrestrial planets in particular, because the methods are strongly biased toward large moons around large planets on favorable orbits—exactly the regime where "if moons are there, they're easiest to see."

From theory and Solar System context, though, you can make a defensible, more careful statement:

Most terrestrial planets probably do not have large, Earth–Moon-scale moons.

That's different from "no moons at all." Tiny moons, temporary captures, quasi-moons, and small-body satellites may be common; what's probably uncommon is a big, dynamically important, long-lived satellite like ours.

Why that's a plausible generalization:

The main pathways to moons don't favor big moons around rocky planets.
For terrestrial planets, the "obvious" way to get a large moon is a giant impact that leaves a debris disk which re-accretes into one (or a few) moons. Earth's Moon is the archetype. But giant impacts are chaotic: you need the right impact geometry, the right mass ratio, and the right angular momentum budget, and then you need the resulting satellite to survive long-term tidal evolution. In other words, it's a real channel, but it's not guaranteed.
Giant impacts are common in late-stage terrestrial formation, but "Moon-making" outcomes may be a subset.
Numerical work emphasizes that late terrestrial planet growth is dominated by giant impacts. That supports the idea that "Earth-like systems" might often get whacked hard. But "often hit hard" doesn't automatically translate into "often end up with a big moon"; many impacts will lead to accretion without a substantial long-lived satellite, or to multiple small remnants, or to outcomes that later get destabilized.
Our Solar System's terrestrial sample does lean toward 'moon-poor.'
Mercury and Venus have none; Earth has one large one; Mars has two tiny ones that are widely treated as captured or otherwise non-Earthlike in origin (your point). If you restrict the discussion to "major moons of the four terrestrial planets," you end up with basically one clear success case: Earth. That makes it tempting to say "Earth is the anomaly." It probably is an anomaly in moon-to-planet mass ratio, even if "impact-born moons" in general aren't vanishingly rare.

So what I'd say, in plain terms, is this:

It's quite plausible that the typical terrestrial planet has either no moons or only small moons, and that large moons like ours are not the default outcome. But it is not yet something we can claim as an empirical rule across the universe, because (so far) exomoon detections are still unconfirmed and heavily biased toward big-planet systems rather than Earth analogs.

If you want a sharper prediction that's still honest, it would be: "Large moons around rocky planets exist, but are probably uncommon; small moons may be common." That's the version that fits both the Solar System pattern and what formation theory tends to suggest, without overclaiming beyond what we can currently observe.

I don't really agree, by the way. Call it intuition. I think it will turn out that most planets in the "terrestroid" class, which includes Venus and Earth, do not have moons at all. Earth is weird because of the Theia collision (if you don't know about that, look it up; it's very interesting and generally accepted now as correct). Captures like Phobos and Deimos (Mars's moons) don't count because they are tiny and don't actually last for billions of years; they get perturbed or crash into the planet. Same with impact ejecta "moonlets" that may survive for a while but aren't real moons. And my "rule of thumb," even if correct,  might not include a common class of planet that doesn't actually exist in the Solar System at all, Superearths.*

*For those who actually find this stuff fascinating, here's some more on Superearths (usually spelled with a hyphen)(Also from Chat GPT),  starting with a definition: 

A planet more massive than Earth but substantially less massive than the Solar System's ice giants (Uranus and Neptune).

Quantitatively

The commonly used ranges are:

Mass: ~1 to ~10 Earth masses (M⊕)
(Many researchers narrow this to ~1–5 M⊕.)
Radius: roughly ~1 to ~1.8 Earth radii (R⊕), though radius-based definitions vary.

Above about 1.6–1.8 Earth radii, many planets are no longer likely to be predominantly rocky; they tend to retain significant volatile envelopes (H/He or thick water layers). That transition is sometimes called the "radius valley" or "Fulton gap."

So in practice, people often distinguish:

Rocky super-Earths (≈1–1.6 R⊕, ≲5 M⊕)
Mini-Neptunes (≈1.6–3 R⊕, often with thick atmospheres)

The boundary is fuzzy and observationally driven rather than conceptually clean.

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What a super-Earth is not

It does not mean "Earth-like."
It does not imply plate tectonics, oceans, or life.
It does not imply similar composition—some may be iron-rich, some water-rich, some gas-enveloped.

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Why the term exists

We don't have any super-Earths in our Solar System. The terrestrial planets top out at 1 M⊕ (Earth), and then there's a large jump to Uranus and Neptune (~14–17 M⊕). Exoplanet surveys revealed that planets in the 1–5 M⊕ range are extremely common—probably the most common type of planet in the galaxy.

So the term "super-Earth" arose simply to describe this very common mass regime that our own Solar System happens not to contain.

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Super-Earths may form differently from Earth (for example, via inward migration in dense inner disks), which means the moon-formation story could be quite different from the Earth–Moon giant-impact scenario. That's still an open theoretical question rather than a settled rule.

  

.....

"The answer" to life, the universe & everything... (No, it's not 42, but it is a dimensionless real number): α (alpha), equal to the strength of the electromagnetic interaction between elementary charged particles:

α = ⁠e²4πε₀ħc ⁠≅ 1/137

where 
e is the elementary charge (~1.602×10⁻¹⁹ C);
h is the Planck constant (~6.626×10⁻³⁴ J⋅Hz⁻¹);
ℏ is the reduced Planck constant, ⁠(h/2π⁠ (~1.055×10⁻³⁴ J⋅s);
c is the speed of light in a vacuum(~300Km⋅s⁻¹);
ε₀ is the electrical permittivity of space (~8.854×10⁻¹² F⋅m⁻¹);
μ₀ is the magnetic permeability of space (~1.2567×10⁻⁶ N⋅A⁻²).
As far as anyone knows, having no reason to suspect otherwise, this is and always has been and always will be true everywhere in the universe, but no one really knows why, if there is a why, this number has the value it does.