Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

• 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.

Reader Vince posted a comment on my 74th birthday entry, asking about my strategy for retiring and getting old. Carol and I do whatever we can to grow old in style and (more to the point) functional and (most pointedly) alive. It’s complicated, but I’ll get as much of it as I can into this single (rather long) entry.

So…we’re retired. Topic #1: Stress. Do what you can to keep it at a minimum. I admit that’s harder if you raised kids, which we did not. We’ve been together now for 57 years, married for 50. We discuss all kinds of things. We laugh. We cuddle. We see to each other’s needs. We take each other very, very seriously. We go to church. We pray. Death may do us part—but not forever.

We have no debt to worry about. We don’t spend extravagantly. We use our cars until they fall apart, which for our 4Runner took 25 years. We’ve bought two lightly used cars from CarMax, and both have been big wins. We didn’t have to go through the usual BS kabuki with conventional dealerships, which is guaranteed to raise your blood pressure. We don’t buy things for the sake of buying them. We bought a Radio Shack stereo the November after our wedding…and it’s still living happily on the entertainment center fifty years later, playing music from dawn to bedtime. Our TV is now 15 years old, and (granted that we don’t watch much TV) it’s still very good at its job.

Topic #2: Brain health. I’ve seen studies suggesting that living with music playing constantly helps with brain health. As I said above, our ancient but flawless stereo plays classical music from our local classical station, KBAQ, from the time we get up until the time that we turn in. Writing helps too, and lord knows I do plenty of that. There is a study of Catholic nuns that’s been underway since 1986, indicating that the nuns who wrote emotionally positive text (often in their daily journals) were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than nuns who didn’t write, and were more likely to live longer. Most of my writing is emotionally positive, so I have some hope that this will apply to me as well, even though I’m not a nun and don’t play one on TV.

I have no studies to support it, but my guess is that programming also contributes to brain health. I still program for fun (generally in Lazarus/Free Pascal) and read whatever current Pascal texts that I can find. I still tinker with electronics and build things, sometimes from kits, and sometimes from scratch. Ham radio helps too. I stay busy.

I teach myself things. I read books on all kinds of stuff, as those who have visited here at Fortress Duntemann may have noticed. I taught myself the Pascal-ish language Lua, though Free Pascal pretty much leaves it in the dirt by comparison. I created a spreadsheet to design solar-twin star systems with planets, which I used in writing The Cunning Blood. You get the idea. Brains matter. Use ‘em or lose ‘em.

Topic #3: Body health. I think that genetics plays more of a role in general health than most people are willing to admit. My Polish immigrant grandfather worked at grimy jobs his whole working life, and lived to just a month short of his 90th birthday. I take after that side of the family. People yell at me for saying it sometimes, but my research suggests that you can do worse than your genes, but you can’t do better. I have good genes, which helps a lot with regard to health. We never smoked or did drugs. I generally have a glass of red wine with non-fish dinners most nights, but I don’t overdo it, and will taper it if my liver numbers start drifting out of range.

Food. We eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and salad. We don’t have a starch course unless we have friends or family over for dinner, and when we do it’s generally polenta (i.e., corn grits). I fry one egg in butter every morning for breakfast. Lunch is usually a slice of cold meat (no bread) rolled up with a slice of cheese, plus some tree nuts. I learned back in the ‘90s that carbs make me fat, especially sugar. So I drink water instead of sodas, and keep starches (breads, pasta, potatoes, etc.) to a minimum. We do have desserts when eating with friends or family, but usually not when we’re alone.

We pay attention to ingredients lists, and avoid things with umpty ingredients that we can’t identify. (I call such foods “chemistry sets.”) We consume organic dairy. Our salads are baby spinach topped by carrot shreds, sliced radishes, diced mushrooms, olive slices (for Carol) and diced red bell pepper (for me.) We buy whatever we can in glass rather than plastic. We don’t snack much, and when we do, it’s almost always either tree nuts or sugarless snacks with only a few ingredients, and nothing freaky. Lately it’s been PopCorners. 3 ingredients: Popped corn, vegetable oil, and salt.

Exercise. We do weight training once a week at the gym, with a trainer who specializes in older people. I walk a lot, which is tricker in hot weather, but I shoot for 6,000 steps a day, and make that target three or four days out of seven.

Sleep. We’re morning people and hop out of bed at 6 or 7 AM, shooting for eight hours a night. Sleep is not optional, and we structure our lives to allow those eight hours to happen almost every night.

Topic #4: Supplements. I take 5 grams of creatine hydroxide every day, and 10 on gym day, generally in my midmorning iced coffee. There is strong evidence that creatine acts against cancer. I also take a standard multivitamin, a D supplement, quercetin/bromelain, zinc, magnesium, and until recently, a B-50. (Carol takes others as recommended by her doc.) My blood pressure is low to normal. We both get physicals once a year, with a broad blood panel and other tests. I pay close attention to my numbers, and take action when test results go out of bounds; e.g, vitamin B-6 and prostate-specific antigen (PSA).

Topic #5: Emotional health. This one is gnarly for a lot of people, but not for me. Carol and I are deeply in love, which is the powerful central element in our emotional health. I don’t do as much on social media as I used to, largely because a great deal of it is slobber-screaming about politics. I do not doomscroll. Nor do I talk about politics. As close as I come is the climate issue, which I research as science and sometimes post about but don’t get involved in tribal fights over. Allowing other people to make me angry gives them control over me, and I won’t abide that. Anger is deadly. My father’s father died of anger. I strive for an upbeat outlook on life and don’t allow current events to bring me down.

Friends. I’ve said this here many times, and I will say it again: Friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit. I have a circle of friends whom I greatly value, granting that a couple of them have followed my writing for thirty or more years without ever meeting me. They’re still friends. I value them more than they probably understand.

And that’s as good a summary as I can fit here. Yes, I will admit that life is a crapshoot, but it’s a gamble I’m willing to take—and so far I’ve done very well. What works for me may not work for you. Live an examined life, and don’t let other people control you. Watch your numbers. Have friends. Stay active. Stay busy. That’s most of it. You may be surprised by what you discover in the process. I certainly was.

74 today. Data from my family tree indicates that I’m doing all right by still breathing: I’ve lived longer than any man in my paternal line going back to one Johann Andreas Duntemann 1729-1808. He made it to 78. If I can log five more years, I’ll be the oldest guy in my paternal line going back as far as I can see, which (for now) is a man born in 1687, who died at 51. I’ve seen the names and lifespans of other, older Duntemann men here and there, but I can’t connect any of them to my own line.

That’s one way to look at a year that wasn’t…exactly…the best. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last fall, had radiation treatment in January, and have recently been told by my oncologist that the radiation worked and my PSA is now 0.86. That was a big drop, let’s say. We need to keep an eye on it, but that’s part of what getting older entails: keeping an eye on all your various “health numbers” as I call them, to be sure nothing is severely out of line. In a blood panel some months back I found that my vitamin B-6 levels were literally off the chart on the high end. Doc told me to quit the B-50 supplements we’ve been taking for years and years. I did. Last Tuesday I gave them some more blood, and learned that my B-6 levels now are dead-center in the normal range.

Whew. (I think.) I’ve never heard of anyone overdosing on B vitamins, but a little research shows that it can happen. I have a mild neuropathy in my right foot, and I have to wonder if excess B6 (pyridoxine) had anything to do with it.

About a month ago we had to send poor little Dash back to his Creator. He was 17 and developing multiple serious symptoms all at once. He lived longer than any of the other six dogs we’ve had as a couple. So the Pack are all now in God’s green fields. We cried, sure. Who wouldn’t? We spent a lot of time with the Pack, and Dash retired from the show ring as an AKC Grand Champion. So he did very well, and we will always imagine him at his best.

There’s nothing like a cancer diagnosis to scramble your creative faculties, and I’m only just recently generating some new ideas and plot arcs for my (stalled) novel, The Molten Flesh. I did publish a new and significantly rewritten version of my 1971 short story “Whale Meat” and later on a new short story, “Morning Man,” about an AI disk jockey at a small-town AM radio station. Both are available for 99c on Amazon. The two stories were platforms to try using generative AI to create covers for short ebook fiction. Not great, not terrible, and I learned a few things in the process.

That’s all the bad stuff. Carol and I have never been closer. We bought a spectacular new car: a Subaru Crosstrek. I got a new mini-split AC installed in my garage/workshop/shack so it’s not always an oven in there. I found a bunch of ancient manuscripts at the bottom of an old box that I thought were gone forever, including parts of a story I wrote when I was 10, on the ancient typewriter my grandmother Sade gave me that year. I’ve made peace with Windows 11. We’re still doing strength training and enjoying it as much as ever.

Nonetheless, I now say 73 to 73. Forgive me if I don’t add ET CUL…

• Creatine not only helps you build muscle—new tests strongly suggest that it can help the body fight cancer cells. The tests are with mice, so there will need to be a lot of further research, but this is great news for anyone (like us) who take creatine on a daily basis.
• Lazarus Version 4.8 is now available. It’s a bugfix release, compiled with FPC 3.2.2. Free and easy to update. Go get it!
• IBM has created a 7 angstrom node for making extremely high-density chips. It’s done by stacking sheets of transistors vertically and bonding the transistors together in a way that makes logic gates etc, with potentially up to 100 billion transistors on a single chip. Screw flying cars. This is the future I had hoped for!
• A guy who’s been blogging now for 25 years lays out a fascinating history of the technology he’s used along that timeline, and how it has evolved. I knew a lot of this (my blog is now 28 years old) but he puts it all in one place in a single well-written article.
• It had to happen. I should have written an SF story about it back in the early ‘80s, but back then I didn’t drink wine. So don’t pop that cork just yet. Claude can act as your AI sommelier.
• Broadcom and OpenAI have announced Jalapeno, a custom chip designed specifically to handle AI inference logic. It’s a sort of AI accelerator, and with any luck at all it will specialize the AI chip market so that the rest of us can afford system memory and SSDs.
• Here’s a slightly weird AI-related site: In The Weights. It’s basically a leaderboard of names present in all the major AIs. I’m #148 on the leaderboard, with a score of 841. It found two hallucinations on me, one claiming that I was an American actor and comedian; the other an electronic/experimental musician. I’m dead certain (but not dead) that I’m the only Jeff Duntemann who has ever lived (yes, I have a third cousin Jeff Dunteman, one n at the end) and I have never done any acting or composing. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
• Venezuela got hit by two violent back-to-back earthquakes, one Richter 7.2 and the second 7.5. Carol and I lived through the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which logged at 6.9, and the quake was one major reason we left the Santa Cruz area in 1990 for Arizona shortly thereafter.