Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

Decades back (in the early 80’s, I think) I got a late evening call from my friend and SF writer Nancy Kress. She was something close to frantic.

“Jeff! You gotta help me!”

“Anything, Nan.” Far be it from me to leave a beautiful woman in a bad situation.

“Then quick: What do they call that tubey thing that pulls screen doors closed when you let go of them?”

Ulp. She could have asked me how to do I/O redirection under DOS. She could have asked me whether Millard Fillmore had ever been on a US postage stamp. She could have asked me the atomic weight of Ruthenium. But no: She asked me for the name of a Thing With No Name.

Not a horse. A thing.

So tell me: What is the name of that long aluminum hydraulic gizmo that hisses coming and going and needs to be propped open with that little skewed iron washer that always lets go just when you’re heading out the door with the old dresser that must not be scratched? I doubt you’ll do any better than I did. Sheesh; I could go out in the garage and build one for you—but I can’t tell you what it’s called.

Nan and I finally decided that knowing precisely what it was called wasn’t germane to her story—a little item called “Out of All Them Bright Stars,” which went on to win a Nebula award for her—so we did the best we could and called it a “door closer.” That was its job, after all, scratched dressers notwithstanding.

The following weekend I went down to Ace Hardware and prowled the aisles until I found a blister-packed replacement unit hanging on a peg. It was…drum roll, please…a door closer.

I was shattered. Surely it was a wheezyank or a tugtube or an Albemarle cylinder. Could there possibly be something that exists by the tens or even hundreds of millions around the country that has no name, and thus drives people to do the obvious and punt with so boring an appellation as…door closer?

Yes, there is. And by paying attention since then I’ve run into a few of the others.

One is a dog thing. Back when we lived in Rochester, New York I was sitting on the couch, watching Mr. Byte squirming around on his back on the living room floor, rubbing his nose on the carpet while making a don’t-bug-me-I’m-heavily-involved sort of noise halfway between a groan and a growl. It occurred to me that I had watched every other dog I had ever owned do exactly the same thing: Rebel, Yankee, Smoker, and now Mr. Byte. This was obviously Important Dog Behavior, at least as important as peeing on things when you’ve long since run out of pee. So what the hell was he doing? There was no word for it, so I made one up: He was schnauzing. From the German for "muzzle." What schnauzers do. And all other dogs as well.

Fits, doesn’t it? Now, please use this word every chance you get so that I can be cited in the Oxford English Dictionary as the person who coined it.

Moving further out into the realm of abstraction, there is the problem that in English we have no single word for “it is to be hoped that…” Most people probably don’t lose a lot of sleep over this one, but it does bother me. I used to admire the French for their terseness, after Sister Agnes Eileen explained to us in third grade that the last Tuesday before Lent was called "Mardi Gras" in French. As she put it, “‘Mardi’ means ‘Tuesday,’ so ‘Mardi Gras’ means ‘the Tuesday on which meat may be eaten.’” Junior logician that I was, I unrolled the syllogism and assumed that “gras” in French meant “on which meat may be eaten.” A dinner plate was thus an “assiette gras,” as was someone’s upper plate, which most certainly is an artifact with which meat may be eaten. Don’t tell me that “gras” means “fat.” Sister wouldn’t lie. Maybe you got the accent marks wrong.

So although I seek in vain, others in my condition have done the obvious thing and stolen another word that isn’t used nearly as often: hopefully. Now, this word really and legally means, “with hope in one’s heart,” as in, “Expecting some word about her order, she rummaged hopefully through the day’s mail.” That is, she rummaged through the mail, filled with a feeling of hope that PC Nirvana will finally either ship her damned mouse or send her a refund.

Desperate word hijackers have taped hopefully’s mouth shut to muffle its screams and begun using the word to mean “it is to be hoped that…” as in, “‘Hopefully, my mouse will show up tomorrow,’ she said, wiping the blood from her arrow keys.” Complain though purists might, the crime’s been committed, and the Law of Conservation of Syllables has been satisfied. Besides, people rarely use the word “hopefully” to mean “with hope in their hearts” anymore, especially when they’re dealing with mail order computer retailers.

Finally, there is what I can only assume is a Jeff thing, because I have never seen or heard anyone else encounter it. It’s a Jeff thing in part because I keep my money loose in my right pants pocket, whereas most people keep theirs in a wallet. When I was fourteen I lost my wallet, and it had the $10 bill in it that I had received for Christmas from my godmother Aunt Kathleen. This cauterized me for all time on the issue of placing so vulnerable a substance as money in so losable a container as a wallet, which hangs precariously off your butt in the embrace of a loose fabric attachment that is far wider (but never deeper) than it needs to be. (Remember, when I was fourteen, $10 was way more money than it is today.)

The Jeff thing in question is what to call the bills that have been sitting in the bottom of your pocket for several weeks. Cash always begins its life in a nice tight roll, but as you peel off a crisp 20 and hand it to the guy at Taco Bell, he hands you back a tatterdemalion wad of greasy ones and fives, which join their fellows in the bottom of your pocket, wrestling and twisting and doing everything but (sigh) reproducing.

Years’n’years ago, before there were ATMs, I went too long without cashing a check, and finally had the occasion of pulling the very last bill out of the bottom of my pocket. It was a remarkably shaped thing indeed, a $10 bill that had spent time in the arms of the Muse, and emerged as something one might call “wealth art” with something approaching (but not achieving) a straight face. Hell, call it whatever you want to; I call it moneygami.

Everything should have a name. If you spot something without a name, give it one quickly, before somebody decides to call it a door closer.

Not entirely sure when I wrote this; I think 2004 but it might have been later. It was too big to put on Contra back then, so I posted it as a separate article on my site.

I don’t watch TV much, and haven’t for quite awhile. It’s a bad use of my time, and never more than recently, when a friend sent me a link to a YouTube group called Isabella Advice. The link was to a video on prostate health, which is a topic of considerable (if fairly recent) interest of mine.

Well. What we have is a video of Isabella, a pleasant-looking forty-ish African American woman who says she’s an MD. It’s a 24-minute video, and I watched it to the end. By the time I reached the end, I knew the truth: The video was generated by an AI, and although the advice was fairly sound (and mostly aligned with the rest of my research) the presentation was a little, well, freaky.

What I noticed first were her hand gestures. There were five or six variations, but each variation was used identically many times during the video. She raises her hands to the same height, sometimes alone, sometimes clasped, sometimes just rising at once without touching one another. Her hands remained in her lap unless she was raising them, and the position of her body didn’t change except for a very slight up-an-down bounce. I’ve seen enough videos to know that presenters rarely sit this odd sort of stock still—not for 24 minutes, at least.

There are captions of what she’s saying, and her voice is good, if a little monotonous. But then…the caption contained a weight, something like 20 lbs. She didn’t say “twenty pounds.” She said, “twenty ell-bees.” Later the caption read ”with your daily 30-inute” with the initial “m” missing, and that’s precisely what she said, “thirty in-oot.” (It’s at 16:35 in the video.) She was literally pronouncing typos.

That nailed it. I’m guessing that someone who knew something about prostate health wrote a script, and the AI voice read it mercilessly verbatim.

When I’ve watched YouTube, it’s usually because somebody is doing something  visual and explaining it: crafts, ham radio, building electronic projects, robots, telescopes, and so on. The visual focus isn’t 100% on the presenter. I could have read what the AI was saying in probably five or six minutes. For the most part, I research by reading, unless there are necessary graphics. Watching an AI sitting in a chair reading a script for half an hour is truly a waste of my time. I won’t do it again, but I’m going to watch for other examples of AI in use, not just on YouTube but anywhere else I run across it. If I spot any, you’ll read about them here.

• Here’s a longish and intriguing article about how our meal schedules affect bodily health. There’s some evidence that morning people eat healthier than night people simply by eating meals earlier. Carol and I jump out of bed a little after 6, and often start dinner at 4:15 PM. Here’s another piece on the topic.
• My friend Pete sent a link to a solid piece on how Internet search worked before Google. I used Alta Vista a lot back then, and had a Usenet login until my ISP stopped carrying it in the late oughts.
• And if you’ve never had a Usenet login and know little or nothing about it, here’s a quick summary.
• An aspirin a day may keep colon cancer from coming back after surgery. They’re still not sure precisely how this works, but as long as it does work, I’m all for it.
• An American PBS affiliate in Denver stored its data in a cloud server. When the cloud server company (not the server hardware company) went under, the PBS affiliate still can’t get its terabytes of TV shows back from the server hardware outfit. I have never liked (nor used) cloud storage, and this is just another instance of why.
• I wasn’t expecting this: Beamforming feedback information (BFI) sent to a router from connected wireless devices like phones, laptops and tablets can be used to generate high-quality images of people within the microwave field used by the local Wi-Fi WLAN installations. The tech is hard to describe, but it generate images of human users detailed enough to identify. Think Flock cameras are bad?
• Some clever scoundrel used a tiny white font displayed on a white background to inject “invisible” (to humans) prompts into an AI working for a court of law in Connecticut. He got caught, but once this trick gets around, it could become a very serious problem.
• Protons are not as simple as they used to be; long ago they were, well, bohring. These days they’re full of valence quarks, baryons, and gluons. Thankfully for us, there’s more matter than antimatter in the cosmos, and scientists hope that this new view of proton anatomy may explain the reason for that precious imbalance.