None Of The Above

I told a joke on Twitter/X. Although it wasn’t much of a joke, it was subtle, or at least I thought so. Twitter has a new feature called Grok, which is an AI that (supposedly) explains posts. I wondered if Grok would get my joke. I might as well copy’n’paste the whole thing here:

Me:

The US government chooses two boll weevils every four years and leases them to the people. This makes the Feds the lessor of two weevils. And the weevils? They’re having a boll.

Grok:

The term "lessor of two weevils" is a play on the phrase "lesser of two evils," which refers to choosing the less unpleasant of two poor options. This phrase is commonly used in political discourse to describe situations where voters choose between two undesirable candidates.

The "boll weevil" in politics historically refers to conservative Democrats, particularly from the Southern United States, who supported some Republican policies during the Reagan administration. This term draws from the insect’s difficulty to eradicate, symbolizing the political resilience of these Democrats.

Jeff Duntemann’s post humorously suggests that in the U.S. political system, the government essentially leases out these conservative figures (boll weevils) to the public every election cycle, playing on the idea of political figures being somewhat unavoidable or persistent like pests.

It came to me as a silly play on words (“lessor of two weevils”) with the rest built around it to make it an actual joke. I wondered if most readers would understand the word “lessor,” which I don’t see much in my reading and don’t recall ever hearing it used in conversation.

Now, I myself didn’t know that “boll weevils” had once been used as a slur against conservative Democrats. I certainly haven’t read it with respect to modern politics. If I had, I would have created the joke another way. I simply meant to imply that the government chooses a couple of weevils every four years, and leases them to the public. We pay officials with our taxes during the time we “lease” them, but never own them. This makes the Feds a “lessor”.

So Grok didn’t get the joke as I intended it to be gotten, but read it as Reagan-era humor. So it goes. My opinion of AI hasn’t changed. It’s a massive pattern-matcher without any least cognizance that its explanations may simply be wrong.

I’ll play with Grok some more to see how well it “explains” additional posts, mine and others’.

Ok, this is probably illegitimate, but it’s one way to get access to literally all my DDJ “Structured Programming” columns, which appeared from 1989-1994. In fact, even I don’t have the files containing the text of many of those columns anymore, so I’m going to download them before circumstances force the poster to take them all down.

My column was distinctive due to a trick I shamelessly copied from Isaac Asimov’s long-running science columns in Fantasy and Science Fiction: Start with a funny but pertinent story. I picked one at random, and it turned out to be one of the better ones. Below is the opener for my January 1992 column, about event-driven programming, which I was studying at the time using Turbo Vision. (I was 39.) It’s just the intro, which lays out an experience I had that most of you have heard of. It really did happen, really. I couldn’t make anything like this up.

Chewing the Wrapper

Jeff Duntemann KG7JF

It was 1971, and I was a college sophomore at a beer bust put on by a fraternity hungry enough for pledges to admit anyone. I was dressed in a bright yellow sweater and bright purple bell-bottoms, trying very hard to grow my hair without realizing the ultimate futility of the effort. (Can you picture me with shoulder-length hair? Sigh. I can’t either.)

As often happens at parties, an impassioned discussion between two people begins to attract a crowd, and before long a considerable fraction of the party was watching me debate some half-sloshed prelaw type on the merits of bringing the United Nations into the Vietnam conflict. Or maybe it was the moral imperative of passing the E.R.A. I forget–because all the while I was half-watching a pretty young woman who was hanging on my every word, following my discourse with this look of unbelieving awe on her face.

Shall we say this was not an everyday occurrence, and her interest inspired me to even greater heights of eloquence. Was it my sweater? My sideburns? Or could it be that at least one girl in this five-and-dime college appreciated the power of brains over biceps?

The prelaw slurred some minor insult at me and slunk away, defeated. The crowd wandered off–but she hung on, eyes like sapphires riveted upon me, and in our single moment of intimacy she breathlessly revealed the secret of her admiration: "You know, you always talk in complete sentences!"

Chewing the Wrapper

My God! She had thrown away the gum and was chewing the wrapper! What about my passion? What about my social awareness? What about my obvious allegiance to the greater good of mankind? No matter–she went home with some football player, and I went home with my complete sentences. I guess in the long run we both got what we deserved. [Note well: By 1971 Carol and I were a very close couple, and I had no interest in the girl as a girl. Her remark just made for a good story.]

There’s a lesson here. Rarely are our creative efforts admired for what we as creators consider most admirable. Isaac Newton wanted to be remembered for his theology–calculus was just a throwaway. The seminal object-orientation of Smalltalk was ignored for 15 years because people were too busy ooh-ing and ahh-ing at its primordial GUI.

I expect this will happen more and more these days, as it ironically grows easier and easier to create a flashy user interface and positively murder to sort out an application’s internals. It’s humbling to keep in mind as you struggle to master event-driven programming under Turbo Vision or Windows: They’re not going to admire the intricate subtlety or robustness of your event loop. They’re going to admire the color coordination of your scroll bars.

It took us a few days, but we got the great room decorated, including trimming both our artificial and natural (and we hope live) tree to the nines. This may be the best real Christmas tree we’ve ever had as a couple, and our hope is that with careful watering it will keep us until Epiphany.

If we have to take it down sooner, well, the experiment was worth doing. Here’s a shot of our real tree, in the corner by the bar:

We don’t use the bar for drinking, so it presents a nice place for decorations, this year including our creche and Carol’s Plasticville Farm, complete with farm animals and a corral of giant bichons:

We’re going to set up the Lionel trains this year, including my father’s 1926 set that is now 98 years old. The venerable #250 electric loco still rips around the track as it doubtless did when my dad was a toddler. We’ll also be running Carol’s Lionel set from the late ‘50s; however, the trains will have to wait until after the cleaning service goes through and mops the tile floor.

I’ll take some pictures of the artificial tree and will post them as time permits. We’ve started Christmas a little early this year, just to see what it’s like to get all Christmas-y on November 29 instead of December 15th or so. Like I said, I’ll keep you posted.

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! I’ve talked about Thanksgiving and the things I’m thankful for here several times, and won’t repeat it all here tonight. All that I said then still applies, though the list has gotten longer over the years. We had dinner with friends, starring a roast goose! I know I’ve had goose but it’s been years—nay, decades—since the last time it crossed my plate. Good wine, good food, good friends. That’s a lot of what I’m thankful for, right there, plus the woman sitting beside me, and her 55 years of love and devotion. I am a man much blessed, and appreciate it.

It was a good day indeed. And today, well, it’s Black Friday. People complain sometimes about Christmas starting the day after Thanksgiving. I’m of two minds about it, and Carol and I prefer not to fight the crowds at major retailers. Like it or not, the reality is that Christmas has become a sort of long-horizon holiday. The stores put out Christmas goodies the day after Halloween. Some people start shopping and celebrating on Black Friday, and others continue it until the Epiphany. This year we decided to start on Black Friday, for a reason: Christmas trees.

The Arizona desert is hard on pine trees shipped down from Minnesota or wherever. We’ve had mixed luck finding trees that lived even two weeks in the stand with plenty of water. In Colorado we had one once that lasted so long it began growing. I doubt that would happen here. But Carol and I had a plan. We knew that Whitfill’s Christmas Trees opened for business on Black Friday, so up 64th Street we went, to their usual spot between Bell Road and the Canal at 64th.

We got there about 2PM, and the joint was jumpin’. They had trees that had to be twelve feet high. Not for us. We wanted something shorter, fuller, and greener. I didn’t want something over seven feet high.

It took us approximately 90 seconds to find the tree that we bought.

It’s very green, very full, maybe not quite seven feet high, and smells ever so wonderful. Trees cost down here; I paid $200. This time I think we got our money’s worth. We think it’s the prettiest tree we’ve ever had. The reason for that is probably getting there before the crowds snapped up all the really good trees. We were there early. We got a good tree. Nay, an excellent tree.

We haven’t begun decorating it yet. We brought all our Christmas decor back from the storage unit a couple of days ago. The tree is now in its stand. Tomorrow we begin. We’ll keep you posted.

• I asked MS CoPilot a simple question—“How does menthol alleviate pain?”—and let it rip. It ripped. And ripped. And ripped, spinning its spinner for four hours before I finally closed the window without any sort of response. I’ve had tolerably good luck working with CoPilot, but this suggests it still has a long way to go.
• MIT appears to agree: They are now telling us that generative AIs do not build world-models and thus cannot be counted on to be useful in any arbitrary context. Ummm…did we really need MIT to tell us that?
• Mayo Clinic researchers have found that stem cells grown in zero-G grow faster and work better in tests than stem cells grown on Earth. The research has only begun, but I could definitely see Elon Musk establishing a stem-cell farm in orbit if that research pans out.
• Jim Strickland sent me a link to a wonderful NASA animation of Moon photos as the Moon orbits Earth, showing all the phases the Moon goes through, including libration and position angle for the full year 2025. As best I can tell, it doesn’t display lunar eclipses, but there are many other places detailing times for those.
• Alzheimer’s may not be a brain disease so much as a mitochondria disease. Other theories beyond amyloid plaques are coming up, and this piece presents a nice summary of why we may be wrong about amyloid plaques and what other mechanisms might be behind dementia.
• There is now reasonable research showing that the infrasonic (very low) sounds emitted by ginormous wind turbines can cause health problems in humans and other animals.
• I ran across Justapedia about a month ago, and so far it holds up well compared to Wikipedia. The idea is to maintain a MediaWiki-based competitor to Wikipedia, one that is deliberately non-political and less obsessed with notability and various other side issues. Take a look. I’m rooting for them, but beating a competitor as entrenched as Wikipedia is a daunting challenge.
• UTIs are very common but kidney infections—which you would think are caused by the same pathogens—are not. Here’s an explanation why.
• When I was a little kid (figure 7 or 8, maybe 9) all the boys of similar age in my neighborhood were allowed to dig a hole in their backyards big enough to sit down in and play with toy soldiers, dinosaurs, or other injection-molded fantasy icons. There’s now evidence that letting kids play in the dirt can train our immune systems to recognize and shake off many more microorganisms than kids living in low-dirt environments like city cores.
• And it’s not just dirt. A Harvard-trained nutritional psychiatrist confirmed that human brains need a diet rich in meat to support mental health. Let’s put it this way: We did not evolve eating kale—but that said, Carol and I do eat a rainbow salad most nights with our meat course. I’m pretty sure that evolution-wise, the meat came first.

It’s done. The first draft of The Everything Machine. I had a lot of trouble with Chapter 57, but a bit of focus and a couple of false starts got it where I knew it had to go. The first draft is now complete. It came in at 131,000 words, which is more than Dreamhealer but less than The Cunning Blood. I’ll most likely carve a couple thousand words out of it, though I paid more attention than usual to dead end scenes and promises early in the manuscript that the later chapters could not fulfill. There just won’t be as much scrap as there usually is.

The Everything Machine Is set in the same universe as The Cunning Blood. just elsewhere in the galaxy. A starship carrying 872 people plus gene-pool plants and animals for the Erewhon colony does a black fold and instead ends up…somewhere. Part of the mystery of the Metaspace stories is that everywhere there is a Sun-like star there is an Earth-like planet. The black fold destroyed the starship’s Hilbert drive, so there’s no going back. Starship Origen’s people and cargo shuttle down to the Earthlike planet’s surface and struggle to survive.

But…there are these alien…things. Clearly artificial, each consists of a 2-meter wide bowl half-filled with silver-gray dust. Beside the bowl is a low platform and two pillars, all made of some indestructible black stone. A teenage boy discovers that if you tap out a 256-bit binary pattern on the two pillars (one pillar for 0, the other for 1) something will coalesce and surface in the bowl. These (early) artifacts are all composed of a silver-gray metal that doesn’t scratch, bend, melt, or allow itself to be pounded flat in a forge. Some are familiar, like axes and shovels. Some are twisted lumps of silver-gray metal that don’t look like anything humans have ever seen.

The inhabitants of a world the inadvertent colonists eventually dub Valeron initially refer to the items produced by the alien machines as “thingies.” As people get used to tapping on the pillars (which respond with a sound for each tap, one pillar high, the other pillar low) they begin calling the artifacts “drumlins” because you drum on the pillars and drumlins appear in the bowl. Yes, I know that a drumlin is a glacial landform, but I repurposed the word because 95% of humanity have never heard it and it worked well in the story.

Planet Valeron is found to have hundreds of thousands of these machines (which are soon dubbed “thingmakers” because that’s what they do) scattered across the planet’s one big continent. Across over 250 years the population survives and grows, largely with the help of the thingmakers and the drumlins they produce. 261 years in, people ride horses and steam locomotives, but clever folk find a lot of useful things in the thingmakers, and begin compiling an index. Five minutes tapping on the pillars with that index in front of you, and you get a new (and indestructible) something. Shovels, hammers, pipe fittings, lengths of pipe, and much, much more.

Drumlins are peculiar in a number of ways. Besides being indestructible, drumlins will not hurt you. Take a drumlin knife to your dinner and it cuts your lamb chop just fine. Force the point of the same knife against the palm of your hand and the blade flattens out into a disk. Pull it back from your hand and it slowly returns to the form of a knife. How does the damned thing know?

That’s only one mystery of many surrounding the thingmakers. Remember Magic Mikey’s “players” from The Cunning Blood? They’re here. If they want to talk to you, they insert words into your consciousness. Talking back to them is tricky but it can be done, especially by peculiar teen girls.

I introduced the Drumlins World in a novelette called “Drumlin Boiler,” which appeared in IASFM for April 2002 and is in my collection Cold Hands and Other Stories. Jim Strickland and I wrote a double novel about the Drumlins World back in 2011. I adapted “Drumlin Boiler” as the first part of The Everything Machine, because it introduces the thingmakers, drumlins, and several characters who play a major role in the story.

There are truckloads of Jeff Duntemann ideas in the novel, but I took extra care to create characters who made sense and could be understood as human beings who could well be friends and loved ones, facing a phenomenon both mysterious and wonderful. I tossed in a couple of low-key love stories. There are fights, explosions, 6-shooters (and 11-shooters) hydrogen airships, sheriffs, starships built by humans and also by, well, whoever created the thingmakers.

That’s as much as I can tell you right now without getting into spoilers. Note well that I still have a huge amount of work to do. I have to do a continuity pass, and either do or hire someone to do an edit pass. Oh, and a cover. That may be the toughest challenge of all.

There are several finish lines in the craft of writing novels. I just got past the first. Plenty others are waiting in the wings, itching for me to cross them.

I’ll keep you posted on how the game is going.

Whew. That was work. Earlier today, I finished the epilogue to The Everything Machine, the big drumlins novel, which I have worked on in fits and starts (and slogs) since 2006.

The first draft is now structurally complete. It isn’t finished, exactly. I’m still rewriting much of Chapter 57, which just didn’t turn out right. And there is a lot of other work to do. The first draft now stands at 128,000 words. I’m hoping to get it down to 125,000 and probably will. That edit pass is still to come.

The idea dates back to 1997, when I got the ideas for both The Everything Machine and The Cunning Blood in one bizarre evening. I was sitting on the edge of our pool with Carol when my brain just suddenly boiled over with ideas. I was days taking notes. What I had was a whole new universe to write in and about. I had a little more concept on The Cunning Blood, so I began that novel first, under the original title No Way in Hell. A publishing colleague warned me that bookstores might not shelve a book with “hell” in the title, so I thought of The Cunning Blood and went with it. Not long thereafter, I was in our local Bookstar store (RIP) and while browsing stumbled across a book called F—k Yes! (minus the hyphens) by the unlikely Wing F. Fing. Face-out, already. So much for bookstores being afraid of the word “hell.”

That was ok; I quickly decided I liked “The Cunning Blood” as a title a whole lot more. I finished it in 1999 and tried to shop it to the big NY SF imprints, without any serious luck. (The editor of one press said, “I came real close on this” which at the time made me feel a little better.) While shopping it I wrote a novelette on the other concept called “Drumlin Boiler.” I sold that to Asimov’s SF in 2000, and it was published in April 2002.

That was about the time that Coriolis went under. I was depressed for a couple of years and didn’t write much fiction. I finally sold The Cunning Blood to a small press in 2005, and it reviewed well in several places, including Analog and Instapundit. In 2006 I started some conceptual work on a novel I called The Anything Machine. I wrote concept scenes and tried to get some momentum going, to no avail. I started Ten Gentle Opportunities about that time, which sucked up most of my creative energy for a couple of years. In 2011 I got together with my friend Jim Strickland and we did a tete-beche double novel with two short novels set on the drumlins planet, as a tribute to the legendary Ace Doubles I had grown up on in the 1960s.

I tried to get a novel-length plot together here and there in the teens, without much success. I published Ten Gentle Opprtunities in 2016, and Dreamhealer in 2020. Finally, on January 5, 2021, I created a new document and got underway. I changed the title from The Anything Machine to The Everything Machine for reasons you’ll understand once you read it. (Keep in mind that I took a year off the project to rewrite my assembly book for X64.)

I used an edited and slightly enlarged version of “Drumlin Boiiler” as the first part of the novel. It introduces the concept of the thingmakers and the drumlins they create, plus several key characters. I drew on the background work I did in Drumlin Circus in 2011, particularly the Bitspace Institute and its three ruling consuls. One consul died in Drumlin Circus, so I was left with Alvah McKinnon and David Orsi. That was enough to light a fire under the main conflict of the book, in which David Orsi goes savagely insane to the point of murdering his own people. Oh, and I threw in airships, because airships are dramatic—and burn spectacularly.

The Everything Machine is by all measure the most complex story I’ve ever told. I had had some faint hopes of writing a whole series of novels about the drumlins world, which I originally named Valinor and later changed to Valeron. (The Tolkien estate has lawyers; Doc Smith (as best I can tell) does not.) But toward the end I got a feeling I didn’t expect: Good as it was, I was getting a little tired of the drumlins concept. I’m 72 and healthy, but I’m also a realist. I don’t necessarily have another 15 or 20 years to slowly reveal the mystery of the thingmakers. So I tossed everything into the pot and across the book explain the whole shebang, with maybe just a couple of minor exceptions that might serve as hooks into future sequels, should I choose to (and are able to) write them.

Today was only the first hurdle of many. I still need to finish rewriting Chapter 57. I then need to do an intensive “continuity pass” to make sure un-shadowed foreshadowings are deleted, names of things don’t change along the way (I spelled McKinnon as MacKinnon here and there) and then timeline problems, yikes. Covers, double yikes. I know what I have to do. I’ve done it before. It will be done.

So the adventure continues. In the meantime, meditate on the number 2E256. That’s roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe. It’s also the number of things that the thingmakers can produce, given a 256-bit binary code tapped on two pillars. That’s a lot of things to make. Where do all those designs come from?

You’ll be surprised. Promise.

What I call “scraps” are short memories that pop into my head at odd moments, sometimes with a recognizable trigger, sometimes without. I was emailing with a friend of mine about Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, and we were bitching about how faint it was, compared to comets Hale-Bopp (1997) and Hyakutake (1996.)

Hyakutake. Kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Then, ping! there it was, a line from a big band-style song sung by a girl group like the Andrews Sisters:

“Hold tight, hold tight, Boodliyakisake!”

I don’t know where or when I heard it, but it rhymes (mostly) with “comet Hyakutaki.” So where did that come from? One challenge: I had no idea how to spell “boodliyakisaki.” I brought up DuckDuckGo and tried all kinds of spellings, and got nowhere.

Hmm. I started looking up songs titled with or containing “hold tight.” There are several. The lyrics sites turned up nothing remotely close to “boodliyakisaki.” Then another part of the scrap popped up: The song was about shrimp and other seafood. Huh? What? But that’s how scraps work: Focus on one and additional bits of it sometimes pop up.

Figuring out memory scraps can be hard. But this time I tried something new: I brought up Copilot and started a conversation. Here’s a copy/paste:

You

What song begins "hold tight, hold tight" and is about seafood?

Copilot

The song you’re thinking of is "Hold Tight, Hold Tight (Want Some Seafood Mama)" by Sidney Bechet. It was released in 1938 and became quite popular. The song has playful, double-entendre lyrics that celebrate various types of seafood.

Ohhhh…kay. Back to the lyrics sites. I searched for the song and several links popped up. It wasn’t “boodliakasaki.” It was “Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki.” With hyphens. Here’s a characteristic sample:

Hold tight hold tight hold tight hold tight
Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki
Want some seafood Mama?
Shrimpers and rice they’re very nice
Hold tight hold tight hold tight hold tight
Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki

Adding to the peculiarity is that some lyrics sites spelled the magic word a different way. I saw “Fododo-de-yacka saki” and another that I can’t find now. A little further research showed me that the Andrews Sisters had in fact recorded it in 1938. You can listen to the song on YouTube.

It may be a silly thing to write an entry about, but the real message I want to leave with you is that CoPilot found it instantly and gave me some context with citation footnotes. I’m still suspicious of AI-assisted anything, but in this case it worked like a champ.

And now I have a taste for shrimp, sigh.

…you’ll forget what you have, and buy more of the same. This has happened to me any number of times down the years, usually for things like small tools and electronic components. But it doesn’t have to be physical goods. Yesterday I heard a piece on our local classical station KBAQ (AKA KBACH) that I had heard before. I like the third movement. The first two are melancholy (one is an adagio, a dirge-y musical form I simply will not touch) but the third is brisk, upbeat, and borderline sprightly. I thought, “Gee, I oughta have that on my mix thumb drive.” So I went up on Amazon and bought it.

The piece is Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez (1939) with Christopher Parkening on classical guitar, backed by orchestra. The performance I bought is not on YouTube, but can be had on Amazon here. I had to buy the whole album; they don’t sell tracks individually on that one. I bought the album anyway and simply won’t play the dreary parts. The third movement really is that good. I was a little surprised I hadn’t bought it before.

I downloaded it, unpacked the .zip, and extracted the third movement, which I dragged and dropped onto my mix thumb drive. When I put the drive back in its USB port on the Durango and went off to do some errands, I searched for the piece.

And found two.

Not of the same file. I found two performances by different artists. I had bought the performance by the Venezuela Symphony back in mid-May of this year. I stopped being surprised that I hadn’t bought it before, because I did.

Ok. Why didn’t I remember that I already had it? Just this: I have 584 tracks on that drive. With that many tracks (and in truth I don’t do a lot of driving) playing tracks randomly gives rise to statistical artifacts. it’s a virtual certainty that a few won’t come up very often. This one was at the far end of that curve: I bought it five months ago and it’s not come up even once since then.

Wotthehell; they’re both good, and now, with two performances in the mix, I may hear at least one of them semiregularly. That curve has an opposite end: I hear the Small Faces’ song “Itchycoo Park” it seems like every other day. (It’s from 1967, when my musical tastes were a lot less discriminating.) Once a month would be plenty.

The lesson here is that we live in The Age of Stuff. The first commandment in the Age of Stuff is Know Your Stuff. If you don’t know your stuff, you will almost certainly buy duplicate stuff.

One way to do this is to keep your stuff in some sort of order. I do that with books by having category areas on my bookshelves: History, Math, Science, Astronomy, Biography, SFF, and on down to things like Model Railroads and Global Warming. Every time I pull a book down, if I have a few moments to spare I scan the category. That keeps me from buying duplicate books.

Usually.

It also triggers memories of books that might be useful in whatever line of research I’m pursuing at the time.

Part of this is, of course, to keep your stuff put away in its usual places. I bought a second small ratchet screwdriver set once because the original one was tossed under a pile of odd lots on my workbench and not seen for literally several years.

I try to keep my workbench clear these days.

Know your stuff. Review it now and then. Keep it in order. You think that’s easy? Try it sometime!