Ideas & Analysis

Discussions of various issues including suggested solutions to problems and pure speculation

Bye Bye 4 By 3 By (Win) 10

I’m feeling old. And it’s not that I’m all that old, but this past week I realized that I had been doing personal computing for a very long time. I’ve been trying to figure out how to deal with Microsoft abandoning support for Windows 10, so the other day I (almost on impulse) bought a new Dell Win 11 desktop. I got it home, connected it to my primary keyboard and mouse, and gave Win 11 a spin.

I honestly don’t understand why Microsoft keeps screwing around with its UIs. The Win 11 desktop is no better than Win 10’s, and in many ways quirky enough to demand close attention to what you’re doing, or trying to do. I’m sure Win 11 has improvements in terms of security and use of resources and other back-of-the-screen stuff, but why the hell do I have to learn the UI all over again?

The biggest question was whether the software I depend on will even run on it. A number of (ok, ancient) utilities refused to run on Windows 7, which will probably always remain my favorite version. So I installed a few significant packages, and they all worked just fine. Plus, the new machine has an SD card slot in the case near the USB ports, which my older (but not ancient) Optiplex 5070 does not. I also found that the new machine did not have a speaker audio port on the back panel. That irritated me at first, but I now understand why it isn’t there. (More on this later.)

As I always do, I popped the side panel and took a look inside, figuring I’d order an M.2 SSD for the empty slot. Except…there was no empty slot. There was one M.2 slot, with a terabyte SSD in it. The machine was misrepresented by a sales person: She said that it had two M.2 slots on it, and one of them was empty. It wasn’t empty. It simply wasn’t there.

And another thing wasn’t there: The machine could not put video into my Samsung 214T 21” 1600 X 1200 4:3 flat monitor, which I bought around 2007. It didn’t support that resolution at all. My Win 10 machine has no trouble with 1600 X 1200. The new Win 11 machine, I discovered, was configured to do a wide-screen 1920 X 1080. I swapped in my only widescreen monitor and boom! There was 1920 X 1080. It would do lower resolutions, but most of those were not 4:3.

By now I was in part disappointed and in part annoyed. My older widescreen monitor is a Dell 22” diagonal and works very well. But it’s not especially large, and I wanted something to make the type larger to reduce eyestrain. I require at least two mass-storage units in my primary machine, so after two days of messing with the Win 11 box, I uninstalled the half-dozen packages I had installed, put it back in its box, and trucked it back to the store. As I expected, they accepted the return, and were very courteous about it. While I was there, I took a close look at a larger Dell monitor, an S2725H. It’s a 27” diagonal, and has almost no bezel around the top and sides. It’s basically all screen but for a small strip on the bottom edge. So I had no trouble fitting it into my computer table setup, which includes the 5070 mini-tower and a laser printer plus other odd junk. It was inexpensive and can display two manuscript pages side by side. Video adjustments are done with a sort of mini-joystick: a little nubbin on the back of the monitor selects which aspect you want to change, followed by a line graph showing how much. Push the nubbin in the right direction and you’re there. Push down on the nubbin to press Enter. Clever, and a lot easier to do than I expected.

My venerable 214T has DVI input, and once I bought my Win 10 machine several years ago (2021?) I needed to use an HDMI to DVI adapter. DVI is long extinct. Desktops are now either DisplayPort or HDMI. (Or in some cases, both.) What I guess I knew in the back of my head but didn’t think about in terms of personal computers is that HDMI (and DisplayPort) carry sound as well as video. And yup, inside that new monitor is a pair of formidable hi-fidelity speakers. Heretofore I had used a cheap set of mini-speakers that sounded, well, cheap and small. Once I played several classical MP3s and some videos into the new monitor, the sound was terrific compared to what had been.

So there was no little green audio jack in the back panel of the Win 11 machine. It had a headphone jack on the front panel, but all the speaker audio went out through HDMI.

I learned a few things in this recent adventure:

Don’t buy a computer on impulse. Research the hell out of it before you slap down your credit card. Dell, at least, has all of its manuals available for free download as PDFs. Look for machines that appeal to you and then go through their manuals. Repeat until you find what you like the most, and will do the jobs you need it to do.
A lot of monitors, by now probably most of them, contain stereo speakers. Audio comes out the same cable video does.
4:3 monitors, like rear-panel audio jacks, are extinct.
Win 11 is inevitable, as much as I’d prefer it to be seriously evitable.

I’m still wrassling with the last point. I suspect I will run a full backup on the 5070 sometime soon and install 11 on it. It does what I need it to do. I only hope and pray that Win 11 won’t hide anything important or paint me into any corners. We’ll see.

So…What’s Next?

Jul 23rd, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

I took a couple of months away from major writing projects after I published The Everything Machine on KDP. It’s sold reasonably well, but it needs more reviews and probably more energy in marketing than I can afford right now. So I’ve been poking around in my writing folders looking for notes or unfinished stories that might be finished. The other day I read through the 38,000 words I have on my non-SF novel Old Catholics. I’ve posted some excerpts here a couple of times across the last seven or eight years. If you’re new to Contra and curious, you can find the excerpts and brief synopses here, here, and here.

Like all my plots, the story is complex, and depends on several key characters, including a resigned priest, the woman he loves, and the cardinal of Chicago. Those three attended Loyola University together and were close friends for…awhile. Many years later, Fr. Rob, who now works at a Catholic goods store selling rosaries and statues, runs into a psychic little old Polish lady from an Old Catholic community that meets in a converted bungalow in Chicago’s Rogers Park. It’s just a few eccentric souls who don’t feel like they belong in mainstream Catholicism. Fr. Rob persuades his college girlfriend, who was excommunicated for divorcing an abusive husband, to attend the church with him. At that point, all sorts of interesting things begin to happen. Then, after the climax, the existing Pope dies, and…you guessed it…the curia elect Chicago’s Cardinal Peter Luchetti as the new Pope, John XXIV. He’s the first American pope, which seemed (back when I wrote what I have) a little far-fetched. And now, surprise! It’s not SF, but I nonetheless predicted something I thought would not happen for decades, if not centuries.

We have an American Pope. Who was born in Chicago.

Wow. Just wow.

Before you jump to conclusions, I know very well that our new Pope Leo XIV was never Chicago’s cardinal. But our new Pope was indeed born in Chicago and did a lot of globe-trotting missionary work before taking the papal throne. So consider this: If I finish and publish Old Catholics, using the notes and plot that I already have, people will assume that I got the idea for an American pope from our new American pope. Not so. Alas, what might have been a startling conclusion for the book in 2015 is just how the church works now in 2025.

I’m conflicted. I may have to throw away big honking chunks of the current text and probably rethink the ending entirely. Will I? Not sure. There are other unfinished projects in my folders, including The Molten Flesh, which has fewer words down but a lot more plot problems. Clearly, there’s some thinking to be done. And brainstorming. And who knows? Maybe I’ll start something brand new from scratch.

Watch this space. When I make a decision, you’ll see it here.

The NYT Vs. ChatGPT

Jul 9th, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

You may have seen this story come up over the last year and change: The New York Times is suing OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, for copyright infringement. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that the lawsuit can move forward. And now—good grief!—the Times is demanding that OpenAI save all discussions people have with ChatGPT. All of them. The whole wad—even conversations that people have deleted.

You want a privacy violation? They’ll give you a privacy violation, of a sort and at a scale that I’ve not seen before. The premise is ridiculous: The Times suspects that people who delete their conversations with ChatGPT have been stealing New York Times IP, and then covering it up to hide the fact that they were stealing IP. After all, if they weren’t stealing IP, why did they delete their conversations?

Privacy as the rest of us understand it doesn’t enter into the Times’ logic at all. The whole business smells of legal subterfuge; that is, to strengthen their copyright infringement case, they’re blaming ChatGPT users. I’ve never tried ChatGPT, and I’m certainly not going anywhere near it now. But this question arises: If a user asks an AI for an article on topic X, does the AI bring back the literal article? Golly, Google does that right now, granting that Google respects paywalls. Can ChatGPT somehow get past a paywall? I rather doubt it. If the Times wants to go after something that does get past its paywall, it had better go after archive.is, over in Iceland. I won’t say much more about that, as it does get past most paywalls and is almost certainly massive copyright infringement.

And all this brings into the spotlight the central question about commercial AI these days: How do AIs use their training data? I confess I don’t fully understand that. This article is a good place to start. Meta’s Llama v3.1 70B was able to cough up 42% of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, though not in one chunk. Meta’s really big problem is that it trained Llama on 81.7 terabytes of pirated material torrented from “shadow libraries” like Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen, and probably other places. I consider these pirate sites, albeit not as blatant as the Pirate Bay, but pirate sites nonetheless.

I’m still looking for a fully digestible explanation of how training an AI actually works, but that’ll come around eventually.

So how might an AI be trained without using pirated material? My guess is that the big AI players will probably cut a deal with major publishers for training rights. A lot of free stuff will come from small Web operators, who don’t have the resources to negotiate a deal with the AI guys. Most of then probably won’t care. In truth, I’d be delighted if AIs swallowed Contra’s 3500+ entries in one gulp. Anything that has my name in it will make the AI more likely to cite me in answer to user questions, and that’s all I’ll ask for.

Ultimately, I’m pretty sure Zuck will cut a deal with NYT, WaPo, the Chicago Trib, and other big IP vendors. Big money will change hands. Meta will probably have to charge people to use Llama to pay off IP holders, and that’s only right.

But lordy, this is a supremely weird business, and I’m pretty sure the bulk of the weirdness is somehow hidden from public scrutiny. Bit by bit it will come out, and I (along with a lot of you) will be watching for it.

Why I Am a Skeptic

May 24th, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

8 comments

Years’n’years ago somebody asked me if contrarianism were just another word for skepticism. My answer was No—but I couldn’t explain why at the time and said I would think about it. I did the promised thinking, though I don’t think I’ve ever explored the issue at length here on Contra or anywhere else. Well, it’s time.

My first insight on the question was that contrarianism is broad, whereas skepticism is narrow. Fleshed out a little, that insight became this: Skepticism is targeted; we’re skeptical about something, not simply skeptical, period. I’ve since refined that insight to its current form:

Contrarianism is a mindset; skepticism is its mechanism.

Contrarianism welcomes (and sometimes celebrates) doubts. Skepticism examines those doubts to determine if they have any value. I explored the notion of contrarianism here on Contra in my entry of January 1, 2009. I didn’t get into skepticism in that piece since people so easily confuse the two.

The scientific method is essentially systematic and disciplined skepticism. The example I often cite is that of the supposed Law of Parity. Some physicists had doubts about the Law of Conservation of Parity as observed in nuclear physics. They did some new experiments in the 1950s, and demonstrated that parity was not always conserved.

I take a little heat from some people over my skepticism of dark matter. We don’t know what true dark matter is made of, but I’m pretty sure it’s not subatomic particles as we understand them. For once, the Grok AI answered my question “What is dark matter made of?” by admitting that we don’t know: “Dark matter’s composition remains unknown.” I have a (personal) hypothesis, since we only know dark matter by the shape of space, and the shape of space is affected by gravity: Dark matter is gravitational distortion of space caused by mass existing in a higher dimension. I don’t claim it’s true, but until more and better research answers the question, that hypothesis remains my best guess. (And I’ll bet there’s a story or three in it!)

Skepticism operates in many other realms than that of science. My skepticism is most active when I confront conventional wisdom, those often bogus things that “everybody knows.” Back in 1970 or so, “everybody” knew that we were about to enter a new ice age. A few years later, when winters didn’t get any worse, the coin flipped and then it was global warming. This sounded fishy to me, and my skepticism kicked into high gear. There are loads of lists online of apocalyptic scare stories about climate that never came even close to being true. I continue to research climate, but as climate research has now become utterly political, I won’t discuss it further here.

Skepticism goads the skeptic into learning new (and often useful) things. I heard the tired old saw, “Fat makes you fat” a great deal in my early life. I went largely low-carb in 1997 by not drinking sugar-sweetened iced tea because I threw a kidney stone. I lost 5 or 6 pounds in a few months. This startled the hell out of me. Over the next several years I researched diet, and when I happened on Gary Taubes’ book Good Calories, Bad Calories, I began to understand. I am now 20 pounds lighter than I was in 1997 because I only rarely have carb dishes like pasta or rice, I rarely drink sodas, and mostly adhere to our diet of meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and salad. Skepticism of conventional wisdom (“Fat makes you fat”) drove me to do that research, and I’ve learned a lot in the process.

It’s important to remember that good skepticism is to some extent skeptical of itself. I overrode my skepticism of the government’s declarations on COVID, and got the Pfizer vacc and its booster. Mercifully, I stopped there, but I remained skeptical enough to get a supply of HCQ and Zinc Sulfate via a telemed MD just in case. When we finally caught COVID in ‘23, the HCQ/Zinc protocol knocked the damned thing out in 5 days. Well, the Powers finally admitted that the Pfizer vacc won’t keep you from getting it or spreading it. It is thus not a vaccine at all, but a form of pre-treatment that carries side effects we’re only now pinning down. Like climate, the side effects issue has become completely political, and I won’t discuss it further here. The lesson is just this: Keep your skepticism on a short leash, and pay attention to its sidebands; i.e., issues to either side of the core object of your skepticism.

Skepticism has other benefits. Skepticism fosters an open mind. Skeptics are scammed a lot less often. Skeptics don’t get swept up into fads and tribal tarpits as easily. Skeptics readily admit when they’re wrong about something, largely because skepticism causes them to be wrong less often.

In short, skepticism has made my life better and taught me a great deal. More than that, in conjunction with my contrarianism, it’s kept me a free man. And that’s why I am a skeptic now and always will be.

Do Italics Demean or Exalt?

Apr 22nd, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

I recently stumbled across a weirdness in the culture of writing: People (editors mostly, but some authors) objecting to the use of italics to set off literal text in another language. To them, the practice is othering, which after sniffing around for a bit I found a number of definitions. The Cambridge Dictionary’s definition is this: “The act of treating someone as though they are not part of a group and are different in some way.” There are others. What the definitions have in common is that othering is about people, not words in a language. I would use the word “shunning,” which is specifically about people, to demonstrate their otherness.

There are a lot of different uses of italics: simple emphasis, a term’s first definition, literal thoughts of characters, formal names of books, plays, ships, and so on. With one exception (stay tuned) I rarely use words from other languages unless they are being absorbed into common English usage and are already chin-deep. With a lot of these, the italics could go either way: Do we italicize “bon mot”? How about “fin de siècle”? or “que sera, sera”? I lean toward italics; again, stay tuned.

People who have read Drumlin Circus or The Everything Machine (and if you haven’t, please do!) are aware of the Bitspace Institute, a cult on the drumlins world obsessed with returning to Earth. They other themselves by excluding women, wearing distinctive clothes, living in a ritual-rich, monastic sort of setting—and speaking classical Latin among themselves, especially in front of non-Institute people, to further demonstrate their otherness. Here’s a sample, from The Everything Machine:

With one foot set a few decimeters ahead of the other, McKinnon tipped
his head back slightly and shouted his command in the Tongue: “Ego Alvah
McKinnon, Consul! Regulam ordinis nostri violastis! Arma ponite, exite et
ante me flectite!” [I am Consul Alvah McKinnon! You have violated the Rule
of our order! Lay down your weapons, come forth, and kneel before me!]

(McKinnon is the senior consul of the Institute. When he speaks a command, Institute men are required to obey.) The use of Latin is a characteristic of the Institute, so across the novel are short exchanges in “The Tongue” as they call it. I put a translation within square brackets after each Latin section. It’s part of the atmosphere surrounding the Institute, and I want it to be noticed. So in a way, it’s another use of italics as emphasis.

In my YA novel Complete Sentences, Eric’s mother speaks some Polish here and there:

Charlene set down her kielbasa. “Mrs. Lund, How do you say ‘Thank you’ in Polish?”

“Dziękuję.”

Here, that dziękuję is Polish is obvious from context. This isn’t always the case:

It might be too late. Bialek poked at the lock’s keypad. Szczury! Someone had gotten to it first!

You might guess from context that it’s some kind of expletive, and it is. Here, “szczury” is Polish for “rats”. The singular form is szczur. Now, there’s a problem with some words, especially from Slavic languages: If you’ve never seen them before, they could look like typos or evidence of corruption in the underlying file. The word “tak” in Polish means “yes.” Used alone, some readers might think it’s a misspelling of “tack.”

Another issue is that the same word might exist in two languages and mean very different things. In Tagalog (the language of the Philippines) the word for sister is “ate.” “Taco” in Japanese means “octopus.” “Slut” is Swedish for “the end.” There are lists of more here and here. My position is that italicizing a word from another language will warn the reader not to jump to conclusions. What italicization means is “this is a word in another language.” There is no judgment whatsoever in that caution.

To the contrary. English is famous for absorbing words from other languages into itself, essentially “othering” those words away from their origins and dropping them heedlessly into the English stewpot. In a sense, italicizing a word from another language honors it as a part of a language and a worthy culture that should be respected, and not treated as just another word collection that we can pick and choose from to fatten up our English.

All that said, it’s really not something worth fighting over. From what I read earlier today, the AP Stylebook recently picked it up. No big deal; I learned on and remain a Chicago Manual of Style guy. I just wanted to point out that most arguments of this type can go both or many ways, and there are nuances that should not be conveniently ignored in the cause of self-aggrandizement. I’ll keep writing the way I’ve always written. Others may do what they want. English survived Finnegan’s Wake. It’ll survive the nuanced uses of italics, whatever those turn out to be as the years roll on.

The Real Danger of Textual AI

Mar 28th, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

3 comments

Now that I have The Everything Machine on the market, I can go back to a couple of other long-term projects. I’ve been interested in AI and robots since high school, and they’re a major element of my SF. All of my AI short stories are gathered in my book, Souls in Silicon. (The stories are almost all upbeat, and a couple of them are pure humor.) The AIs in Souls in Silicon are not what we call AI today. I’m starting to hear a new term: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) which makes more sense in terms of science-fictional AIs. AGI is AI that can reason and deal with reality pretty much the same way human minds do. Will this ever happen? I doubt it. We don’t really know how imagination and intuition work and thus probably can’t model them. What we have today are not AGI but large language models (LLMs). I had the insight this morning, after playing around with Grok, that the better LLMs are, the more dangerous they are.

They are definitely getting better. And they are already pretty dangerous.

This time around, I’ve been testing Grok, the AI component of X/Twitter. My tests consist of asking it questions with verifiable answers. (I have not yet tested Grok’s image generator. Patience, patience.) Most of these tests are of the form, Who is XXXXXXXXX? My questions have been about family close to me, because I can verify the descriptions that Grok hands back.

Grok did a fair job with the question Who is Carol Duntemann? Its answer:

Carol Duntemann, born Carol Ostruska on June 1, 1953, is the wife of Jeff Duntemann, a writer, editor, and technology industry professional. They met as juniors in high school and married in October 1976. Carol has been a significant presence in Jeff’s life, often mentioned in his writings, including his blog, Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary. Together, they have lived in various places, including Colorado Springs, Colorado, and currently reside in Scottsdale, Arizona. Carol is known to share Jeff’s interest in their Bichon Frise dogs, with the couple having owned several over the years, including a current dog named Dash. While Carol herself is not a public figure in the same way as Jeff, she is a key part of his personal narrative, often described as a partner who helped shape his life significantly. Public records indicate she has been associated with addresses in Colorado Springs, such as 145 Stanwell Street and 4120 Danceglen Drive, tied to the phone number (719) XXX-XXXX.

(I Xed out the phone number, which was correct, in case it’s been reassigned.) How well did Grok do? Its sole error in this answer is Carol’s birth date. It’s wrong, and thus dangerous. More on that later. Let’s look at another one. Who is Kathleen Duntemann?

Kathleen Duntemann could refer to different individuals based on available context, but the most prominent and well-documented person with this name tied to public records and family history is Kathleen M. Duntemann (1920–1999), who was Jeff Duntemann’s aunt and godmother.

Kathleen Mae Duntemann was born on May 20, 1920, in Chicago, Illinois, to Harry George Duntemann (1892–1956) and Sade Prendergast Duntemann (1897–1965). She grew up in Chicago, and the 1940 U.S. Census shows her living there with her parents and younger brother, Frank W. Duntemann (Jeff’s father, 1922–1978), at the age of 19. Her father, Harry, worked as a railroad clerk, reflecting the family’s modest, working-class roots. Kathleen never married and remained close to her family throughout her life, often playing a significant role in family gatherings and history-keeping.

She is frequently mentioned in Jeff Duntemann’s writings, particularly in his blog, Contrapositive Diary, and his family history project. Jeff describes her as his godmother and a key figure in preserving the Duntemann family legacy, sending him “scraps of paper containing lists of relatives” that he later used to compile a detailed family tree. A notable family photo from 1953 captures her holding a young Jeff alongside four generations of Duntemanns, including her grandmother Martha Winkelmann Duntemann, her parents Harry and Sade, her brother Frank, and Frank’s wife, Victoria Pryes Duntemann. Kathleen lived much of her life in Chicago before moving to Des Plaines, Illinois, where she died on October 25, 1999, at the age of 79. Her legacy within the family underscores her as a connector of generations, though she did not leave a public career or widely recognized mark beyond that sphere.

Grok admits that there may be other Kathleen Duntemanns (there aren’t) as it admits with most other names. It gets points for that. Ok. More errors here: My grandmother Sade was born in 1892, not 1897. My Aunt Kathleen was born on 30 August 1920. She died on 8 July 1999. Grok got the years right, but neither the months nor the dates. My grandfather Harry was never a railroad clerk. He worked his entire adult life for the First National Bank of Chicago, and retired as a vice president of that bank, Chicago’s biggest. The family’s origins were very much middle-class to upper-middle-class. Kathleen lived in Chicago her entire life, and never in Des Plaines.

Now, hold onto your hats. Grok’s answer to my last question is a lulu. This Contra entry is getting long, longer than I prefer to do, but this business is important. Bear with me. Who is Jeff Duntemann? I asked. Heh.

Jeff Duntemann has had a multifaceted career primarily centered around writing, editing, and technology, with a strong focus on computing and science fiction. Born on June 29, 1952, in Chicago, Illinois, he developed an early interest in electronics and writing, which shaped his professional path.

He began his career in technical writing and editing, notably working at Xerox Corporation as an office machine repairman from around 1972 to 1976, where he gained hands-on experience with early office technology. This technical background informed his later work in the computing industry. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he transitioned into programming and writing about computers. He became a prominent figure in the personal computing revolution, contributing to the development and documentation of software tools. One of his significant early contributions was as a programmer and documenter for the Turbo Pascal compiler at Borland International, starting in 1985. His work helped make Turbo Pascal a widely used tool among developers, and he wrote several influential programming books, including Assembly Language from Square One (1990), Borland Pascal from Square One (1992), and Jeff Duntemann’s Wi-Fi Guide (2004), which catered to both beginners and advanced users.

Duntemann also made a mark in technical publishing. He served as an editor for various magazines, most notably as the editor-in-chief of PC Techniques (later renamed Visual Developer Magazine) from 1989 to 1998, under Coriolis Group Books, a publishing company he co-founded with Keith Weiskamp. Coriolis became known for its extensive line of computer books, and Duntemann’s editorial work extended to other publications like Dr. Dobb’s Journal and Byte Magazine. His writing was characterized by a clear, engaging style that made complex technical topics accessible, earning him a loyal readership.

Parallel to his technical career, Duntemann pursued science fiction writing. He sold his first short story, "Our Lady of the Endless Sky," to Amazing Stories in 1979 and continued to publish fiction intermittently, including works like “Cold Hands” (1982) and the novel The Cunning Blood (2005). His fiction often blended speculative ideas with his technical expertise, though it remained a smaller part of his career compared to his nonfiction output.

After leaving Coriolis in the late 1990s, he continued freelance writing and consulting, focusing on topics like wireless networking and software development. He also maintained a blog, Jeff Duntemann’s Contrapositive Diary, where he wrote about technology, science fiction, and personal interests like astronomy and vintage electronics until health challenges slowed his output. In 2018, he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and later faced pulmonary fibrosis, which he documented candidly, reflecting his lifelong habit of sharing knowledge. His last blog entry was on December 15, 2024, and he passed away on December 27, 2024, as noted in an obituary by his wife, Carol.

Duntemann’s career reflects a blend of technical innovation, educational writing, and creative storytelling, leaving a lasting impact on the computing community and a niche legacy in science fiction.

Wow. I didn’t know I was dead. I do not have atrial fibrillation nor pulmonary fibroids. Years and dates are all over the place. I was a Xerox repairman from 1974-1976. I sold “Our Lady of the Endless Sky” to Nova 4 in 1973, not 1979, nor to Amazing Stories. “Cold Hands” was published in 1980, not 1982. Coriolis went under in 2002, not 1998. I just pinched myself; I’m not dead yet. Etc.

My point in all this is that the closer AIs come to describing reality in answers to questions, the more people will trust their answers—including facts that are nonetheless wrong. Those bogus facts can be annoying, or worse. Birth and death dates have legal significance, as do many other things. If a scattered few errors are buried in a lot of otherwise correct text, those errors may be taken as the truth by users of the AI software.

In short, the fewer errors there are in AI answers, the more dangerous those answers become, because people will be more likely to trust AI answers as entirely correct. And given what I know about how LLMs work, I’m pretty sure that AI answers of any complexity will contain errors, not just now but probably forever.

Keep that in mind if you ever ask an AI questions on which anything of value depends. You wouldn’t want people to think you were dead.

Creatine

Feb 27th, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Carol and I have done weight training almost continuously since 2004. (We dropped it during the turbulent couple of years we were moving from Colorado Springs down here to Scottsdale.) About a month or so ago, my trainer at the gym recommended a supplement called creatine, which I’d never heard of. He said it helps build muscle. That’s what we pay him for, so if there’s something that supports that goal, I’m willing to try it.

Creatine is yet another chemical that the body manufactures for its own use in keeping muscles and skeletal infrastructure healthy. And like so much else, as people get older they produce less internally. So given that we’re now in our 70s, well, like I said before: I’m willing to try it. Creatine is widely used by bodybuilders. Carol and I are not bodybuilders. We’re mostly trying to keep what muscle we have and maybe put on a little more. Some research suggests creatine improves brain health and may put off or reduce the effects of disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Good if true, but evidence there is thin.

In truth, what sold me on creatine is its role in providing energy to the body. Creatine increases the body’s supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is part of a complicated system for delivering chemical energy to cells. Across the last five years or so, my personal energy levels have fallen. I’m an old guy; that happens. But supplementing creatine provides more of the body’s “energy currency,” as explained in the NIH paper linked above. (Yeah, it’s a slog, but read it!) More on this shortly.

As a supplement, creatine monohydrate is a white powder that you can buy in both flavored and unflavored forms. I bought a jar of the unflavored Sunwarrior brand at the Natural Grocer store nearby. It dissolves readily in water or almost any water-based liquid. The jar comes with a scoop to measure out 5 grams. We take 5 grams daily. Carol puts it in her daily protein shake. I currently put it in sugar-free Activia liquid probiotic yogurt. (I recently had an infected tooth and had to take a course of strong antibiotics. The doc said eat probiotic yogurt for awhile to counteract whatever havoc the pills may have committed on my gut biome.)

What I’d really prefer (and will probably switch to soon) is putting my 5 grams of creatine into my daily iced coffee, which I drink about 10 AM. Many people put it in tea, but since I’m prone to kidney stones (which tea can cause) I’m going with coffee.

But…some online articles suggest that caffeine partially inhibits the effects of creatine. That bothered me until I found another Healthline article citing some solid 2017 research putting that rumor to rest. So once I run out of those cute little Activia Dailies, my creatine is going in my coffee.

As with any change in diet or meds, placebo may have something to do with it, but I <i>do</i> feel a little more energetic than in previous years. We’ll see if that continues as time goes on.

There’s one more thing about creatine that you need to be aware of, and it does bother me a little: Creatine promotes water retention in the body. In the month that I’ve been taking creatine, I’ve gained a little over four pounds. Our diet here is low-carb and I’ve hovered close to 150 for some years. Our diet hasn’t changed, so what’s with those four new pounds? Water. It makes me wonder if I’ve been a little bit dehydrated ever since we moved back to single-digit-humidity Arizona in 2015. Possible; hard to know. As with any significant supplement, it would be worth asking your doc about it. I’m just telling you that it seems to work and does not appear to have a downside if you don’t overdo it. Let me know of current or future results if you’re taking it too.

Seven Hundred…What?

Feb 7th, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

In a box on the floor of my walk-in closet are all the vinyl LPs Carol and I decided to keep. Some few we now have on CD or MP3; most are obscure, with just a few in the middle. Somewhere in there is a Steeleye Span LP I very much enjoyed, Now We Are Six. It’s almost entirely “traditional” material, indicating folk songs going (often) waythehell back. However, Steeleye Span recorded them using modern-day rock instrumentation, and I was surprised back in the ‘80s at how seamlessly the combo worked.

Well, one of those traditional songs popped into my head the other day, as music from my past often does. The song is “Seven Hundred Elves,” and you can catch it on YouTube if you like that sort of thing. It’s fluky enough to expand on a little. This flukiness was apparent to me way back in 1984.

The song is a ballad (lyrics here, on Mudcat) about a farmer who strikes out into the west (of what land we aren’t told) to find a place to build his farm. He brings his hawk and his hound, and evidently some big axes and serious muscle. He starts cutting down trees and eating the deer, and eventually word gets back to the elves. So the elves descend on the farmer’s house to make their preferences known. The farmer, knowing that creatures like elves are non-Christian, sets up crosses all over his little farmhouse, and the elves run screaming in all directions.

Farmer 1, elves 0.

Now, for the flukiness:

All the elves from out the wood began to dance and spring
And marched towards the farmer’s house, their lengthy tails to swing.

Huh? Ok, I’m no expert on folklore. But if you’re going to write fantasy, you have to read it. I’ve read quite a bit, and never once have I seen mention of elves with tails. Lengthy tails, at that. And even if said elves were on the small size, seven hundred of them would be piled up twenty deep around the house.

I’m pretty sure they aren’t elves. My guess is that they’re…monkeys.

I’ve read that over in India (I think) hordes of monkeys sometimes descend on villages and become serious nuisances. Lengthy tails swinging? Sure. Foul and grim? Well, what do monkeys throw at each other?

There is some evidence that the song is an adaptation of an old Danish ballad. The Danish version speaks of trolls, not elves. And I think trolls are even less likely to have lengthy tails than elves. Alas, I don’t think Denmark ever had native monkeys in their ecosphere. But suppose, just suppose, that the story ultimately came to the Danes from south Asia, where monkeys are native? That would work.

Which brings me to the point of this morning’s wander, an insight I had back in 1984: Could mythical creatures like elves and dwarves and pixies and so on be ancestral memories of now-extinct hominids? (Yeah, I know, monkeys are not hominids. I’m broadening the concept here.) Homo floresiensis were only 3’6” tall. We don’t know how tall the Denisovians were from a couple of bones and a few teeth. In general, our hominid forerunners were smaller than we are. Even the Neanderthals were short, if wide and probably mondo muscular. I could see them inspiring dwarves, if not elves.

And who knows what hominids and monkeys and other primates we’ve not yet found fossils for? The Homo floresiensis fossils weren’t discovered until 2003, Denisovians until 2010. Maybe there were cold-weather monkeys. The Denisovians lived (among other places) in Siberia.

Quick aside: Tolkien didn’t invent the word “hobbit.” There are some old 19th century booklets called The Denham Tracts listing all kinds of mythical creatures, including hobbits. The whole list is there on Wikipedia, with most having their own Wiki pages. If you’re tired of writing stories about elves and dwarves, well, you’ve got a lot more to choose from.

Again, my point here is that ancient tales handed down for thousands of years could well be inspired by long-extinct primates, most of which we have no evidence for. As for what inspired mythical giants, well, given how short other hominids were, dare I suggest…us?

I so dare. And I will dare until we find some (provably genuine) 8-foot-tall hominid skeletons.

As we used to say in the ‘60s: Crazy world, ain’t it?

A New Year, A New Book (Almost)

Jan 1st, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Happy new year to everybody out there! May it indeed be happy, healthy, successful, safe, and fulfilling. Carol and I and Dash are still in good shape. Dash is 15 1/2, so he’s slowing down. Carol and I, well, we’re in damn good shape for being in our 70s. July will be 56 years since we met. October will bring our 49th wedding anniversary. We are more deeply in love and friendship than ever before.

It may not be what I’m remembered for in years to come, if I’m remembered at all…but my relationship with Carol is what I consider the finest thing I have ever accomplished, and she what I am by far the most thankful for. Every year brings more and better for us. Yes, friendship is the cornerstone of our love, and how it all came about. Every year that passes makes that clearer.

But friendship is also the cornerstone of the human spirit, and I’m thankful for all the years that many of you have been reading me here and elsewhere, and offering me comments and suggestions and commendations. Stick with me; more words are on their way.

The Everything Machine, my fourth novel (or fifth, if Drumlin Circus counts as a novel) hits the streets this year. It’s the “big” drumlins story, set in the same universe as The Cunning Blood, but on the other side of the galaxy. It incorporates my novelette “Drumlin Boiler,” which Asimov’s published in 2002. The manuscript is complete. I’m in discussion with an artist for a cover. I wrote the back cover copy yesterday afternoon. We’re getting there.

I did a long, close copy edit on it across the last couple of weeks. Some people have suggested that I should hire an editor to do a pass over it. I considered for some time, and finally decided against it. One reason is that while there’s plenty of action in The Everything Machine, what I put most of my energy into was the creation of the characters. Characterization was always my weak spot as a writer. This project has been a deliberate effort to improve that skill. I’m still an ideas guy, but this time, I’m giving my characters equal time with what I consider my finest SF concept in all the years I’ve been writing. There’s deliberate nuance in the characterization, and I’m leery of having someone else miss that nuance and unintentionally polish it away.

One of my alpha readers gave me a compliment that suggests it’s working: Joe said that he could always tell which character is speaking in the story, and that each has a distinctive voice and presence. Here’s an example of how I’m trying to do this:

Orsi staggered back, his eyes widening. “So you are the girl who tortured Gad Roche…with your mind.”

Maristella bit her lower lip. “That shitpile had a gun to my head. I did what I hadta do.” Maristella pointed down at the deck. “So do we got us a deal or not?”

Orsi took several long breaths. McKinnon thought he was trembling. “Prove to me…that this is…a starship.”

Consul David Orsi is weak, taking intermittent breaths, and coughing a great deal. Maristella is a bright 15-year-old farm girl who had been tossed out of grade school for being “weird.” The Bitspace Institute murdered her father and is holding her mother captive. She is angry, and more bitter than a teen girl should be.

I’m expecting some grumbling about how complicated the story is. There are several story arcs and more major characters than I’ve put in a novel before. I think it works, and my alpha readers think it works. We’ll see how it goes over with the readership at large.

It’s taken more time than my other novels, in part because I’m not 50 anymore, and in part because I had to set it aside for a year to update my assembly language book. I rewrote several parts of it more than once. I got the idea waaaaaaay back in 1997, and it will be a boggling relief once it’s finally completed and on sale.

I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, there are electronics to play with, and a solar maximum to allow station K7JPD to be heard farther off than California. I’m guessing that it’s going to be a mighty good year. So good luck and make it happen!

A High-Glass Investigation

Dec 10th, 2024

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

Some weeks back I tried a red blend called Magic Box, and when it was gone and I rinsed the bottle for recycling, the bottle seemed awfully heavy compared to the multitudes of 750ml bottles I’ve handled down the years. The Magic Box wine was so-so and I probably won’t buy it again. But man, it took a lotta glass to get from their ships to my lips.

As if I didn’t have anything better to do, I started setting aside empty 750ml glass bottles, not only of wine but of San Pellegrino sparkling water and Torani sugar-free coffee syrup. After accumulating six bottles, I weighed them on our digital postal scale. It’s quite a spread:

San Pellegrino sparkling water 15.6 oz
Torani coffee syrup 1 lb 0.65 oz
Radius red blend 1 lb 0.15 oz
Saracco Moscato 1 lb 1.15 oz
Menage a Trois Silk red blend 1 lb 7.95 oz
Magic Box red blend 1 lb 13.25 oz

None of these bottles contained high-carbonation wine like champagne. The only one with any fizz at all was the Pellegrino sparkling water—and that was the lightweight of the bunch. Yes, yes, I know, there’s lots more fizz in champagne. Since I don’t like champagne I won’t be able to weigh a champagne bottle for comparison. If you have an empty champagne bottle and a postal scale, hey, weigh it and let us know in the comments.

Nor did I log prices per bottle. Keep in mind that I rarely pay more than $20 for a bottle of wine. So it was all cheap-ish wine, at least by sophisticated wine-fanatic standards. I have a glass of wine with dinner, and cook with it here and there. I don’t mull (heh) my wine, looking for hints of loamy forest floor or galvanized iron.

Nope. Just a stray thought that triggered a question that led to a simple experiment. I’ve done it before. I will do it again. Questions (even those without answers) are a goodly part of what makes life worthwhile.