Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

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.