Jeff Duntemann's ContraPositive Diary

First on my do-it list this morning was to deliver a lecture at Miami University at Middletown, Ohio. I'm still here in Colorado (though, alas, Carol is in Chicago again and I'm batching it until the 26th) but it worked out well, and the lecture was my first "production" use of Skype and the Mikogo plug-in for Skype for remote presentation.

Jay Slough K4ZLE of the Southwest Ohio Digital and Technical Symposium asked me to do an hour-long presentation on Carl & Jerry well over a year ago, but our schedules didn't mesh in January 2008, and we had to wait a year for another chance. In a way that was good, because in my view, Mikogo plows NetMeeting (which we had intended to use last year) right into the soil.

Mikogo adds presentation capability to any participant in a Skype conference call running the plug-in. Whatever is displayed on the screen of the chat participant deemed the presenter is echoed on all other participant screens. The presenter can change at any point, so people can take turns presenting to the group. Mikogo defaults to screen echo only, but it has an option for remote control, a la VNC. Mikogo also allows the presenter to draw nondestructively on the echoed screen, whiteboard-style, though I didn't need this feature for today's session.

I'm a seasoned lecturer and have done presentations to groups as large as a thousand people, but there was a critical difference this time: I couldn't see the audience, and could hear them only faintly. The other end of the Skype/Mikogo connection was Jay's laptop driving a big-screen VGA projector in a university classroom, with Jay at the controls wearing a headset. I sat here in my chair in front of the screen in my office, talking into my headset between Powerpoint slide changes and trying to remember not to wave my hands. I missed not being able to play off the audience, and couldn't tell if they were laughing at my jokes. During the Q&A in the last five minutes, Jay had to relay all questions to me, which was awkward even if necessary.

Technologically it went well, though it took a couple of minutes longer than we planned to get the two systems talking to each other. During the presentation, Thunderbird popped up an email notifier box in the lower right corner of the screen, and until I could shoot the box it became part of the screen echo. The symposium gang out in Ohio apparently loved it, and it was a great opportunity to popularize Carl & Jerry to people I would probably never have connected with otherwise.

I'd do it again in a heartbeat, but I'd like to add some refinements, which I think Skype could support:

• I want a cam aimed at the audience, with a mic that will pick up general sound from the same direction. Video from the cam would have to go on a second display, but displays are cheap. Audience feedback is important, whether you're a stand-up geek comedian like me or not.
• Less necessary, but it might help the general tenor of the presentation: Somehow display a borderless video window in the lower left corner of the presentation screen, so that the audience can see me. (I'd leave a hole in my slides sized to match the video window.) How well this would work is obscure but readily testable. My webcam is four years old and I probably should get a new one. Logitech sells high-res units that automatically integrate with Skype.

Other applications of this system suggest themselves: Real-time manuscript workshopping, with workshop participants taking turns echoing their screens while displaying their manuscripts. Tech support. And (as Pete Albrecht and I intend to try in the next few days) remote control of his big Meade telescope and imager.

Skype is a fine thing. Pete is in a Skype window right now, telling me about the new Skype competitor, Oovoo, which adds session recording to videoconferencing. Skype lacks that feature, and it would be handy for people (like me!) who couldn't make it all the way to Ohio for the Symposium. More when (or if) I try it.

• I got drilled and post-ed yesterday and am mostly over it. The weirdest part of the whole procedure was listening to Dr. Salcetti cranking the implant post down into my jawbone with a small tool that sounded like—and in fact actually is—a miniature ratchet driver. (We will not speak of the earlier sound, of her drill going into bone, both sounding and feeling like a drill press working its way into something gummy.)
• For the first time I managed a major-release upgrade of Ubuntu without any fussing. Going from 8.04 to 8.10 took about half an hour, but it went absolutely without incident. (In the past I've had to restart the upgrade after it froze, and once I just gave up and did a clean install after reformatting the partition.) I don't see a lot of differences in Intrepid Ibex beyond the wallpaper, which initially puzzled me. It looks like a soda glass ring on somebody's dirty leather couch arm, but after staring at it for a moment I saw the ibex. Sorry; I liked the heron better—and I tremble to think what the wallpaper will be for v9.04 Jaunty Jackalope next spring.
• Well, alas, Kubuntu didn't fare as well—the upgrade crashed somewhere partway through, and the instance (which is still shown as v8.04 in grub) will not boot. At some point I will reformat the partition and reinstall from the ISO. KDE 4 is an acquired taste, but I've watched it evolve for many years and won't stop now.
• November 2008 is the 25th anniversary of the release of Turbo Pascal 1.0. David I will be printing selected "How I discovered Turbo Pascal" stories in his blog, and although mine is well-nigh legendary (I practically had to be beaten over the head to try it) I will be writing it up and sending it to him shortly. Damn little in tech has ever affected me more than that!
• Bob Ballantine W8SU sent me a scan of John T. Frye's 1985 obituary the other day, and it was severely disturbing: Frye died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Maybe it could have been an accident, but somehow I doubt it. Too many lonely writers (Piper, Disch, and others) have died by their own hands. He is buried with his parents at Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport. Scroll down or search for Frye in the plot listings.
• Finally, Pete Albrecht reports that the New York Daily News spoke of an election day get-out-the-vote promo in which Krispy Kreme handed out "donut-shaped stars." (See the figure caption.) I've seen these in SF (recall that long-forgotten turkey, Nova by Samuel Delaney) but never in a donut shop. Maybe Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker works there. Talk about fresh from a hot oven!

• I've posted a significant update of my Carl & Jerry page, with new material on John T. Frye, including the conclusion I've drawn (with help from 1910, 1920, and 1930 census records provided by Bob Ballantine W8SU) that Bailey Frye was not John Frye's brother. Bob also sent out a scan of W9EGV's QSL card, worked up against a 50s cover (not sure precisely what issue) of Boy's Life. New details from newspaper clippings sent me by Michael Holley flesh out the man a little. He was quite a guy. Do take a look.
• Science is good at puncturing legends, and German researchers digging around in the former backyard of Martin Luther have deflated the legend that Luther was a humble monk (and, by implication, starving) but was instead born to an upper-class family and became a prosperous man who weighed 23 stone, 8 pounds (330 pounds for us Yanks) and ate goose, young piglet, several kinds of fish, and (egad) robins. Nor did he pound his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenburg cathedral in a fury with nails, as legend holds, but instead used drawing pins—what in America we call thumb tacks. Oh, the humanity...
• While researching Marian apparitions for a seminar I'm teaching at our church in November, I ran across the Apparitions of Jesus and Mary Reference Chart. It sounds silly, but trust me: The apparition curve has gone exponential in the last 30 years, and you can't tell the Marys without a program anymore.
• I'm in the Chicago area for a few days, and found on my arrival that the legendary Choo-Choo Restaurant in Des Plaines (just down the street and around the corner from our condo) is in danger of being razed to make room for a new police station. There's a Web site for gathering protest and forwarding it to the City of Des Plaines, which apparently can either raze the Choo-Choo or the defunct Masonic temple across the street. I don't quite understand why that's a hard decision.
• Harry Helms sends word that TV Guide, which Rupert Murdoch bought ten years ago for three billion dollars, has been sold for...a buck. Boy, the magazine business is not what it used to be. (If it were, I'd still be in it.)
• Slashdot reports a bit of useful black humor, in that Codeweavers (makers of the Crossover product line) gave the Bush administration a challenge: Reduce the cost of gasoline in the Twin Cities below $2.79 a gallon, and they would give away their products for an entire day. Well, courtesy the recent financial meltdown (which was not caused exclusively or perhaps even primarily by the Bush administration, by the way) gas has gone south of $2.79, and while the Codeweavers site has been Slashdotted into paralysis, there is a facility online whereby the firm will email you an unlock code for something. I've been meaning to try Crossover Linux for some time. Here's my chance, I guess. And gas in Colorado Springs is even cheaper than that. Inc(Boggle);

I just uploaded a new version of my Carl & Jerry index, including an expanded bio of John T. Frye. We know a lot more about him than we did a couple of months ago, and almost all of the new material came to me from Lisa Enfinger, whose parents were close friends of Frye's for many years. I'll summarize here:

• John Frye was stricken by polio as an infant, and he could not walk at all, throughout his entire life.
• That said, he was not immobile: He had hand controls installed on all of his cars, and traveled extensively throughout the United States. He owned a 1963 Olds Dynamic 88, but no word on whether he ever had a Buick. (Legend holds that he was a Buick man, but no one can tell me why that should be so.)
• Remarkably enough, he never attended Purdue University, but instead studied at the University of Indiana, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago. Lisa did not know if he ever received a degree.
• More remarkably, he never studied engineering, but preferred English, journalism, history, and psychology.
• Her parents both attended Purdue in the 1940s while earning their degrees in chemistry, and John visited them there. He probably knew other people at Purdue, and it was not a long drive to Layafette from Logansport in any event.
• He is credited with close to 600 short articles, including Carl & Jerry and Mac's Service Shop. His first publication was supposedly in Hugo Gernsback's Radio Craft in the early 1930s.
• Her great uncle Gene Buntain was Frye's close high school friend in Logansport, and the two of them discovered electronics and ham radio together. (Could Gene Buntain have been the inspiration for Carl?)
• John Frye lived much or most of his life at 1810 Spear St. in Logansport, one block south of US 24. It was a little weird to dive down from orbit on Google Earth and be staring at the roof of Frye's old house. One wonders what the man himself would have thought of it.

I dug through my smallish collection of really old radio magazines (including a few Radio Craft) and did not see him there, but if any of you guys can find any of his early articles, I would like citations.

Needless to say, I'm still looking for details on John Frye's life, especially concerning where he learned radio and TV servicing and where he practiced it. Lisa said she never heard of him owning his own shop nor even working for a shop in town, so that would be a question worth answering.

Finally, I had written to Frye's younger brother Bailey Frye late last year, but he was evidently too ill to respond, and I found today that he passed away at the end of April, at age 90.

Many thanks to Lisa Enfinger for taking the time to send me all the information, including the scan of a newspaper article from 1962 that I first lined to a couple of weeks ago, including a picture of Frye at that time, when he was 42.

• Stumbled across a spectacular site devoted to WW-I era military aviation. These guys restore and actually build faithful replicas of things like the Sopwith Triplane. Go through the photo albums if you have any least interest in such things.
• Harry Helms asks if Götterdämmerung will occur on September 10. Maybe in Europe, but not over here; Americans can't even spell "physics" much less Gotter...well, you know, Wagner's Really Big Show. Hey, I survived the 70s—strangelets don't bother me.
• Owen Shurson sent me a link to Magic Angle Sculptures, and forsooth, I have never seen anything quite like it before. Basically, you have bizarre 3-D sculpture things that cast morphing shadows under bright light. Watch the video.
• Don Lancaster reminded me that a "spandrel" (see my entry for September 1, 2008) is a medium-sized hunting dog that comes in two varieties: Crocker and Springy.
• Mike Reith told me about a free alternative to Camtasia Studio, for recording on-screen activity to use in demos or tutorials. I really need to study video—yeah, I know, I told myself that four years ago—and this is high on the list of video things to play around with.
• So far, I've run across only one voice-training product, Singing Coach Unlimited, a $99 item that may or may not teach harmony. (Doesn't look like it.) Many thanks to Larry Nelson for the pointer. We still may need Harmony Hero.
• I was contacted by a woman whose parents were very close friends of John T. Frye. She sent me a scanned newspaper clipping from 1962, showing Frye at his typewriter, and ferdam if he doesn't look like a grown-up version of the canonical drawing of Jerry. More on this as I digest all she sent me. I'll update the Carl & Jerry page sometime this coming week.
• Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a page of Photoshopped Far Side tributes. Alas, no sign of "Welcome to Hell. Here's your accordion."
• There will apparently be an all-electric version of the Smart Fortwo to go nose-to-nose with GM's Volt. Let's hope they call it the Ohm. Resistance is Futile.
• Eggs apparently are much healthier than we thought they were—but just tasting sweetness may cause metabolic disruptions. Crap, how will I live without Diet Citrus Drop? I shouldn't worry; by next week eggs will be deadly again and diet sodas will get a clean slate.
• I've pretty much decided that Contra and much of my other Web content will go into a CMS over the coming year. So far Drupal is the top contender. In the meantime, I'm brushing up on my CSS.

• For a little over a year, I've been buying dry-roasted peanuts from Safeway that do not contain MSG. Recently we noticed that the packaging had changed, and checked the ingredients. MSG returns, gakkh. Dry-roasted peanuts are a much better snack than their rep would have it, but MSG makes me feel weird in the head, so the search for MSG-free dry-roasted peanuts resumes. Interestingly, I had a couple of Planter's dry-roasted peanuts the other day (knowing full-well that they have MSG in them; I had a few, not handfuls) and they do not taste any different. Not better. Not worse. Not a little bit. Not at all. So the companies that print "monosodium glutamate (flavor enhancer)" on their peanut labels are being ripped off. MSG does not enhance flavor. What it does do is mess some people over (like me, and countless others) and cost the vendors money. MSG is cheap, but not free. When will food packagers realize that they could save money and increase their market by just dumping it?
• Pertinent to the above, Jay's Barbecue Potato Chips also lack MSG, and are the only barbeque potato chips I've ever seen that don't have it. They are a Chicago brand, and so far we haven't seen them in Colorado Springs. But when I'm here, I gorge.
• I'm a big fan of lashup railcars, but I startled a little when Pete Albrecht sent me a link to a model of a pink Galloping Goose. The paint schemes are described as "authentic." So was there ever a Rio Grande Goose in pink and white livery? I've not been able to determine that—but whoa, somehow I doubt it. That's a spit-and-baling-wire, real-man's tin-roof rough-and-tumble item that reminds me of Mad Max as much as it does of the Old West. Pink? Sheesh!
• A tenured professor at the University of Minnesota has put out a call for Catholics to send him consecrated Eucharistic hosts...so that he can desecrate them. I had hoped this was an urban legend, but the Washington Times generally knows better. I wonder if he (and his clueless university) understand that this doesn't hurt the Church at all, but makes higher education in general and university professors in particular look mean-spirited and ridiculous. (Quick: Somebody test that guy for toxoplasmosis...)
• From Michael Covington comes a link to a Modern Mechanix item from 1933 that may be the original "watt dog" cooker, which spawned a famous Carl & Jerry story cautioning young tinkerers about the hazards of messing with line current. A board with nails pounded through it, facing up...with 110V on the nails. Wow. (And while you're there, click on the cover image to get a closer look at what was prompting young geeks to buy magazines in 1933. Maybe the Flynn Effect really does exist.)
• On second thought, probably not.
• Thanks to Baron_Waste, I discovered that the United States' net carbon emissions declined by 3% between 2000 and 2006. Of the top 17 carbon emitters, only France reduced emissions more—and I'd wager that that's because France has had the good sense to stuff their antinuclear crackpots in the Bastille and forget about them.
• Nertz. Wrong. France closed the Bastille in 1789. Well, hey: Today is the 158th birthday of the ice maker.

This one took a lot longer than I had hoped—and certainly longer than the seething two weeks I spent on Volume 4—but the fifth and final volume of Carl & Jerry: Their Complete Adventures is now complete, uploaded, and available on Lulu.com. This has been my major spare-time project for well over a year, and I scratched my head now and then as to why it was taking so much time and energy. Well, here's why: It required 989 pages in five separate books to print the 263,232 words and 311 illustrations in the 119 stories. That's a lot of stuff. I mean, a lot.

But it's done. I'm extremely happy with the way it all turned out, and the fan mail has been very encouraging. The only complaint I've seen is one chap moaning that, "You mean, there's only 119 stories?" Yup. I wish there were more too; Carl & Jerry are sui generis. The only thing even remotely similar is Bertrand Brimley's Mad Scientists Club, all books of which (fortunately) are still in print, in nice new editions with all the original Charles Geer pencil sketches and watercolors. Somewhere further on the fringes are Tom Swift, Jr and the Danny Dunn books, but the fact remains that Carl & Jerry were talking about real technology, not Repelatrons and antigravity paint. Read the stories and you will learn a few things, albeit things that were first-run between 1954 and 1964.

I added a few things to Volume 5. One is a schematic published a few months after the story of Carl & Jerry's primordial beambot, "The Lightning Bug," from a Popular Electronics reader who built his own Lightning Bug. That's one of my top 5 all-time favorite Carl & Jerry yarns, and I've posted a free PDF containing it. It's unusual in that if you want to build your own, the circuit is right there and ready to go.

One thing that added some time to the task was a topic index that ran to 19 pages. People have written me to ask, "What was the Carl & Jerry story where the crook was getting away in an iceboat?" All they remembered was the iceboat. That's just the way human memory works; quirky is too kind a word for it. So I went through all 119 stories and built an alphabetical topic index, including any memory tag I could think of for each story. If you want to look up all the stories about Carl's dog Bosco, it's there. If you want to know which story saw the boys build a proton precession magnetometer, it's there. Skunks figured significantly in two stories, so flip to "Skunk" and there they are. Ditto Norma, Mr. Gruber, radio-controlled models, sonar, fishing, smoke signals, Morse code, car thieves, and on and on. Dare you not to find a story you remember there.

Finally, I added two new stories, written today in 2008 and not forty-five years ago. One is by George Ewing WA8WTE, who actually built the gadget in the story he wrote, way long ago at Michigan Tech, about the same time that Carl & Jerry were at fictional Parvoo University. It's basically about building a seismometer from a broken pinball machine, and it's beautifully done. The other story is my own, and I borrowed a gimmick from Arthur C. Clarke as way to explain how reflecting telescopes work. Both are tall tales, but that's what John T. Frye was offering back in the 60s, and both stories are authentically tall, done very much in Frye's own style.

And so it's done. Here's the link to my Lulu storefront where all five books may be purchased. Many thanks to Michael Covington, for putting the bug in my ear back in August 2006, and to Pete Albrecht, who taught me how to un-halftone the illos. (He also did quite a few of them for me.) Also, thanks to Doug Faunt N6TQS who sent me the last few issues that I didn't have and somehow just couldn't nail on eBay.

And now it's on to other things. Writing, of course, and putting together the two collections of my short SF that I've been promising for years. And FreePascal from Square One. Plenty to do here; all I need now is the time to do it.

I just turned loose another Carl and Jerry free story, this one of particular interest, because one of Jerry's nearly always infallible techie plots is foiled—by his girl-geek cousin Pat! Considering that the story originally appeared in December 1958, this is remarkable. John T. Frye was a man of his era, but he respected ability and education far more than he respected the social conventions of his time. Female electronics enthusiasts were very uncommon in 1958, but they existed, as evidenced by some of the ham radio "YLs"—Young Ladies, of whatever age—who built their own rigs from loose parts and worked the world with them.

The story is a hoot, and it's one of the reasons I'm glad I've put as much time into the series as I have. I had never read "Under the Mistletoe" before I began the Carl & Jerry project, because I never had any issues of Popular Electronics that old. Now that I've read them all (some of them many times while searching for typos) it's become clear that Frye had a much better opinion of women than most male engineers had in the Fifties. In later issues, once the boys went off to Parvoo University (a very thin disguise for Purdue) they quickly found engineering student girlfriends who somehow managed to master electronics without completely abandoning the 1950s image of young women. Mainstream SF was only beginning to appreciate women as equals of men in that era, but for Frye, it was just part of his unwavering conviction that if you know the tech, you're in the club, and nothing much else mattered.

I am hard at work on the fifth and final volume of Carl and Jerry: Their Complete Adventures, and the last volume is a little different from the first four, each of which contained at least 24 stories. (The first volume contained partial year 1954, for a total of 27 stories.) John Frye did not write a story for every month in the years 1963-1964. Those two years show only 20 stories, with the last one appearing in November 1964. This leaves me a little extra room in a 200-page book, and I want to try something: Carl and Jerry fanfic. I've been asking around for new "classic" Carl and Jerry tutorial stories, and I received one not long back from George Ewing WA8WTE. I'm planning one myself, and I think there's space for yet another one or even two. By "classic" I mean a story written precisely as John Frye would have written it, set in the early-mid 1960s, and limited to technology that was present (if not necessarily uibiquitous) back then. I want the same characters, the same settings, and the same general length, at least 2,000 but no more than 3,000 words. If you're writer enough to do good pastiche, stylistic similarity is also a plus. (This may be tougher than it sounds.)

Above all, the story must present some sort of tech concept in a way that helps people understand how it works. People who followed Carl and Jerry when they were first-run will know precisely what this means; if you're much younger than I and unfamiliar with them, please download and read some of the free stories (all PDFs in the 1.5 - 3 MB size range) from my Carl and Jerry page.

This is a paying market, though it won't make you rich and I don't think it will get you into SFWA. I'm buying first rights only, and paying something somewhere south of $80; how much south depends on how much work I have to put into it to make it publishable. Again, we're talking a POD book with lifetime sales potential in the low (or maybe mid) hundreds, so there's not a lot of money on the table. It really is fanfic.

The new stories will need illos; again, done in a style that respects the original period art without necessarily duplicating it. I don't know how many artists I have in my readership (my stats tell me I get 12,000 - 15,000 unique visitors per month, excluding LiveJournal, so I hope there are some) but if you're interested, there are illos in the free stories to give you a sense for what I mean. The artists and art styles varied broadly over the series' 10 years; some of the art is realistic, and some borders on cartoons. The approach matters less than skill in execution. Again, I'm paying for the art, but I'm not sure how much yet.

Contact me if you're interested.

Well, if you've breezed through Arthur Machen on your broomstick and are now fresh out of Halloween reading, you might download "The Hand of Selene," a free Carl and Jerry story originally published in the November 1960 Popular Electronics. In the story, the boys create a very creepy, remote-controlled severed hand for use in a seance put on by Norma for her sorority sisters. The hand rests on a glass tabletop and taps out answers to questions, and works out better than Norma had imagined when she asked the boys for help. (You'd think she'd have figured out by that time that Carl and Jerry always produce the goods!)

Here's the link:

http://www.copperwood.com/Carl_and_Jerry-V13N05-The_Hand_of_Selene.pdf

1.3 MB PDF.

I was out in Chicago most of the summer and didn't get a lot done beyond what I absolutely have to do, and one of the projects that got pushed into the deep freeze was the fourth volume of Carl and Jerry. I had promised it originally in August, then in September, and I didn't even start scanning until October 8. Then I went crazy with it, and if you haven't seen much from me in the last two weeks, that's why.

I did the whole 196-page book in fifteen days, including scanning and OCRing the magazines, cleaning up the OCR files, scanning the illos, processing the illos, laying the whole thing out, and proofing it. Whew.

It was great practice, particularly in image processing. In that I was helped by Photoshop expert Pete Albrecht, whose astroimages should not be missed. (See his recent backyard photograph of galaxy M33, an object so pale and low-contrast that I couldn't find it with my 8" scope, even though M33 is the angular size of the full Moon.) It also helped that the magazines I bought for 1961 and 1962 were in much better shape than the crinkly, moldy messes I had for Volume 3's 1959.

There's a lot of great stuff in this volume, including several of my all-time favorites, like "A Low Blow" and "Therry and the Pirates." I've pinched off "A Low Blow" as a free PDF, which you can download here. All of the other free stories can be had at my Carl and Jerry Web site. Look for story titles in bold in the story index.

I'm not going to do Volume 5 in fifteen days, trust me. I intend to start sooner and take it slower, and I expect to get that last book in the series done on or about New Year's Day. I will continue to lay out more free stories as time allows, as time has not for the past couple of months.

I realize that I've been working on the Carl and Jerry project now for an entire year, and pretty soon it will be done. Egad. What am I gonna do with all my free time after Volume 5 goes live?

Whew. I just saved out and backed up the final PDFs for Carl & Jerry Volume 4. Did the whole thing from a dead stop (including scanning all 24 stories out of the old magazines) in fifteen days flat. Of course, that entailed pushing aside everything else (including some paying work) and doing some late evenings slapscanning, but it's done and I will announce here when it's up on Lulu and ready to buy.

In the meantime, I was amused to see a recent dustup on Slashdot about the old logician's maxim, "Correlation does not imply causation." The topic at hand was a scientific paper about the correlation between the crime rate and the elimination of lead from gasoline in the United States. (PDF file.) Twenty years after the amount of lead emitted into the environment fell radically, the violent crime rate was down 56%. That's not completely new news, though it was nice to get a good summary. What was amusing were all the snarky arguments in the comments about correlation and causation.

Anytime anything like this appears, somebody jumps up and yells "Correlation does not imply causation!" and for some reason considers the discussion closed. Then somebody else jumps on him, pointing out the rigor with which the correlation between the two factors was studied, and that in this case, correlation does ferdamnsure imply causation.

What's funny is that both are right. The problems lies in our two different meanings of the word "imply." In logic, "imply" means "necessarily follows from." In modern English outside the lofty field of logic, "imply" simply means "suggests," which may not be a diametrically opposite meaning, but is certainly 90 degrees skewed.

Correlation certainly suggests causation, and in fact is the great birthplace of hypotheses within the scientific process. It doesn't prove causation in a logical sense, of course—not in the absence of a great deal of additional data gathering, testing, and interpretation of results.

What I can't quite figure is the ideology here (all the snarkiest Slashdot arguments emerge from some sort of ideology) but at least it's a done deal and the results went our way, whether we understood what was at stake in 1973 or not. And—oh yeah—words matter!

• I was doing some keyword browsing on Lulu, and happened upon this book. I'm not sure what it's about; it might be a novel about someone working in a Parisian lingerie shop...but look closely at the book's list of keywords.
• From the "What are the chances?" file: I've fixed a dozen or so typos in the three Carl and Jerry books so far, nearly all of them OCR errors that I didn't catch during the edit pass. Well, yesterday a reader came up with another: The OCR software changed an "s" to a "c" and turned the very Carl-and-Jerry-ish word "insulation" to "inculation." Now, I don't read in that field and had literally never seen the word before, but if you don't know what it is, see the Urban Dictionary. The good news is I had a new book body file uploaded to Lulu in ten minutes flat. God bless POD publishing!
• While fooling around with an electrical design that used sandbox power resistors as heating elements, I realized that I wasn't an ace at calculating back from voltage and power dissipation to resistance. A little Google work, and bang! A calculator. The hardest work used to be the math. Now the hardest work is digging through a milk jug for a couple of 2700 ohm, fifteen or twenty watt resistors. (Repeat to self: V Squared over P...V Squared over P...)
• Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon has been released. The next codename will be Hardy Heron. A nice essay on Ubuntu's nutty namings can be found here. There seems to be an alphabetic progression underway (and what is Sue Grafton going to do after she writes Z is for Zaptieh?) so if I get a vote I'd want the one after that to be Itchy Inchworm.
• Roy Harvey sent me a Gizmodo link describing a cordless screwdriver powered by a capacitor. I knew this was coming. I knew it. They had to have made the Farad such a big unit for something. The screwdriver charges in 90 seconds. (Will it screw in more than one screw before needing a recharge?)
• Finally, still another batch of the World's Strangest Vehicles, from Dark Roasted Blend by way of the Make blog. Wowsers.

Carl & Jerry fans have been beating my door down wanting to know where Volume 4 is, and so I've been spending all spare cycles on getting the book done in time for release by Halloween. I have all the story text scanned in and OCRed, and now I'm doing the edit pass on the text, fixing OCR errors and removing whatever formatting inconsistences the OCR software inserted. (It paints what it sees, and it doesn't always see precisely the same font size, column width, etc.)

And once again I confront a conundrum I've confronted repeatedly since I first attempted to resurrect old printed material several years ago, with an 1875 history book called The New Reformation: How much do you improve a text that you're preserving? Do you preserve the errors? Do you make it easier to read? The New Reformation was written in Victorian times for a British audience. I agonized over whether to give it a modern copy edit to make it more accessible to American readers in 2007. (There are plenty of Americans who do not have any idea what a "gaol" is.) I ended up changing British spellings to American spellings but left the stuffy diction intact. I'm a crackshot copy editor and could have made it a lot easier for moderns to read. I often wonder if I should have. I just don't know, but I think I did the right thing.

It's tougher with Carl & Jerry. The stories were never meant to be literature, and none of us griped about the quality of the writing—the quirkiness of the writing, in fact, is part of the series' charm. However, it looks like Popular Electronics in the 1954-1964 era did little or no copy editing, and in fact little proofreading. For example, last night I spotted the following:

Carl pushed open the door to discover Jerry speakingly slowly...

Easy call, and easy fix. Other things are a tougher call:

Both boys belonged to the Army's Reserve Officer Training Corps, familiarly known on the campus as "rot-see," and that is why they were in the armory. Strictly speaking, that is why Jerry was in the armory.

Not everyone would call that an error, but to me it "sounds funny." I fixed it. A little later, I ran across this:

"Right here," Jerry replied, poking the little glass beads, each of which was about three-tenths of an inch long and one-eighth inch in diameter, with a forefinger.

Technically correct, but it sure sounds like the glass beads had forefingers. (I left that one as-is.) Multiply that by fifteen or twenty such decisions per story, and you'll see what I'm up against.

I had the same reaction recently while reading The Skylark of Space as a text file on my Tablet PC. Reading it on a display (as opposed to reading it in a book) engaged my editor's reflexes, and I kept catching myself thinking how I could make it read a lot better with a little polishing. Its copyrights have expired, so no one could make a legal case if I did—but I think Doc Smith's fans would be upset. Were I (or anyone) to take the edge off Smith's legendary clunker writing style, something would be missing, and it's tough to explain just what. Any competent editor could make the pulps read better, but where (or what) would the pulps be if they didn't sound...pulpy?

What all do we value in older writing? Tough question, especially when you have the power to change it. Is there any use in a concept we might call FanEd, as opposed to Fanfic? People are doing this; see Tom Swift Lives! for an example of a fan who is literally rewriting the old Tom Swift, Jr. books to make them read better. He's a good writer, and it works, though there's little left of the original in some of the rewrites, which are more properly fanfic. Some of the later Tom Swift Jr. books were so bad as to be called "unreadable" even by their fans. Should they be fixed?

No answers—but it's an interesting question, and as an editor, one I face on a regular basis.

• There's an ancient and (from all appearances) abandoned German cemetery at the southeast corner of Rand Road and Golf Road in Des Plaines, just northwest of Chicago. I passed it on my walk yesterday, and took ten minutes to walk the rows and look for any familiar names. I didn't see any names from my own family tree, but it was interesting nonetheless. Of the 80-ish graves I saw (and it looks like many have long since been removed) at least half were of people who died in the 19th century, though one man was buried there as late as 1975. Many markers are broken or mostly buried, and there is one foundation for a now-gone mausoleum. A little Googling showed it to belong to Immanuel Lutheran Church, on Lee Street in downtown Des Plaines, but there is no sign on site to that effect, and there is no fence nor much evidence of any care save the occasional mowing of weeds. I did find a page with a summary of readable markers. For you geofreaks, it's located at 42° 3'9.79"N 87°53'40.49"W.
• After an insane amount of time wasted screwing with the drivers, configuration, and application setup, I finally got LightScribe to work on one of my Dell SX270 XP machines. I have yet to get it to work on any Win2K machine, and I've begun to wonder if there's something in LightScribe that (intentionally or not) simply doesn't play well with 2000. However, once I burned a few LightScribe labels, I must say that I don't recommend it, even on XP. The contrast is very poor, and if the text is small enough to express titles for 20 songs, it's virtually unreadable. Don't bother.
• One of my favorite hymn tunes is Gustav Holst's Thaxted (named after the town in England where he grew up) which most people recognize as the great anthem around which Holst built the Jupiter movement of The Planets. Anglophiles may also know the tune as that of the WWI-era patriotic hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country." The Wikipedia writeup indicates that it has a meter of 13 13 13 13 13 13, which is extremely uncommon and may be unique among Christian hymns. Is that why it still gives me chills after hearing it literally hundreds of times? Why are we moved by some tunes (absent words to carry emotional content) and not others?
• Saw something today (at Trader Joe's) that I'd never seen nor heard of before: The pluot. Quarter plum, three quarters apricot. They look like plums, but were not for sale individually and I didn't want to buy a whole package without knowing a little bit more about what they were. I like both plums and apricots, though; how can I lose?
• George Ewing's review of the first Carl & Jerry books is now on the stands in CQ Magazine, page 35. Although we still don't know much about John T. Frye, a chap who used to live in Logansport, Indiana wrote this afternoon to tell me that John's younger brother Bailey WA9OWH is still alive and still living in Logansport. I'm hoping to contact him in the next few days to see if he can provide any additional details. John T. Frye himself died in 1985.

• Don Lancaster wrote to say that Carl and Jerry were not the first to build a house-current hot-dog cooker. Don built a couple when he was in high school, and said that it was a pretty common school shop project in the shop books back in 1954.
• On a recent "celebrity" episode of Jeopardy, a CNN news anchor did not know the question to the Final Jeopardy answer: "It's the permanent member country of the UN Security Council with the smallest land area." An actor (Harry Shearer?) knew the answer. A fashion designer said "My apartment" as a "witty" way of saying, "I have no clue." The CNN anchor had no clue either, (she said "France") but you and I might expect that she would know at least a little about current affairs. Fast forward to the recent DefCon, where NBC sent a beautiful blond reporter (looks just like a network cracker, right?) to act as a mole and try and get the goods for a TV special on hackers and hacking. They were on to her instantly, and basically humiliated both her and NBC. The punchline is something that all media people need to memorize as part of Journalism 101: "Don't screw around with people who are smarter than you." Which (in light of my own personal experience with TV news people) would be most of them.
• The HTML editor I'm looking for has to be utterly WYSIWYG—think InDesign for the Web—and my big surprise is that such are almost non-existent. This is a real puzzler; writing HTML markup from scratch is a mostly idiotic waste of time when what you're doing is tantamount to page layout. (Web sites with data-driven back ends are a different matter.) Dropping into an HTML line editor is something that I do now and then, but the bulk of my Web content consists of static collections of text boxes with an occasional image, and you shouldn't need to write HTML manually to do that.
• Pertinent to the above: NVu came on the scene looking like a replacement for Dreamweaver 3 (which is what I have used since 1999 or so) but it hasn't seen a release in over two years and although there's been some (sparse) muttering from the author on his blog, from here it looks like it's been abandoned.
• For you Compactron fans out there: I discovered that the 6J10/6Z10 tube consists of a 6BN6 gated beam detector plus the power pentode section of a 6T9. Circuits for the 6BN6 and the 6T9 are common, so you can stitch together a one-tube detector/audio module without circuits specific to the 6Z10. I intend to do this when I get back home and will report here.

• My hosting service disabled exec() server-wide the other day, and without exec() my installation of Gallery is mostly useless. I can't install new photos nor modify existing ones. Sectorlink doesn't really have much in the line of suggestions, but I have to wonder what else doesn't work. Moving my photos to another online service will be a lot of work and I'd prefer not to. Gnash.
• I uploaded another Carl & Jerry free story the other day. This one is about a hot-dog cooker that Jerry comes up with, and is the earliest mention (February 1959) that I've seen of cooking hot dogs by running house current through them and treating them as resistance elements. I've since see this done a number of times (mostly at SF gatherings, natch) and there was actually a commercial product called the Presto Hot Dogger that did it in the Seventies.
• There is a very nice VHF FM receiver project by Charles Irwin in the July, 2007 issue of Nuts and Volts. The receiver uses an MC3362 receiver chip, plus an LM358, a CD4066, and an LM386 for audio. Much of the additional complication presented by the LM358 and the CD4066 is to provide squelch; in the similar receiver that I built in 1995, the squelch function was built into an obscure low-power Motorola audio amp chip, the MC34119, and there were thus only two ICs in the whole receiver. The author does not offer parts kits, but he makes the PC board files available here.
• Pertinent to my note on "meta-education" yesterday, see Michael Covington's lecture "How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily," which is precisely what I was talking about. This needs to be a book. I mean, this really needs to be a book!
• I'd be curious to know if anyone has used the XStandard Editor and if so, what your reactions have been. My HTML editor is getting very old now (1999) and it does not generate sufficiently clean HTML for my liking.
• Does lead poisoning lead to criminal activity? Here's an interesting piece from the Washington Post that suggests it may. Thanks to Michael Covington for the link.

Whew. I said it would be out in May, and it's out in May, if by the skin of my teeth. You can get it at Lulu.com. I am not nearly as experienced in image processing as in text layout (we always had lots of graphics types on staff at Coriolis) so dealing with very fine halftone-screened art took some study and practice on my part—and Pete Albrecht, God love 'im, helped me make my May deadline by processing most of 1960 illustrations for the book.

I'm targeting September for Volume 4, which at least won't require me to learn any new skills—the artwork is basically the same general style throughout the 1961-1962 period that Volume 4 covers. I have all the magazines here, and in stark contrast to the mold-encrusted pile from 1959, they're all in pretty good shape.

So although I'm taking a few days off, the scanning will begin again soon, and by mid-September we should have Volume 4. (I have another Old Catholic reprint book to clean up and index before I get started.) Volume 5 presents a slight problem, in that it will contain the last 20 Carl and Jerry stories (rather than 24) and thus will be a little short. I've asked some people who have written me about Carl and Jerry's influence on their young lives to send me their impressions of how the stories (and Popular Electronics generally) pushed them into careers or at least satisfying hobbies involving science and technology. If you'd like to add your thoughts, send them to me and I'll work them in. Keep it to 500 words or less if you could.

As I've told a few people, I'm looking into locating original Carl and Jerry stories written by people other than John Frye, and may try to write a couple myself. I would love to do a sixth volume that is entirely Carl and Jerry fanfic, if I could find enough of it. We're a ways off on that project, but with enough material it could be a lot of fun.

Odd words pop up in odd places. While I was building the Carl & Jerry story index, I read all 119 of the stories in the space of a couple of weeks. The text was not fantastic, and I decided not to soften its quirky nature except to eliminate genuine typos or gross grammatical errors. The stories are told in the ordinary language spoken in central Indiana, complete with what I assume are genuine colloquialisms of the 1950s:

Jerry ignored this nasty remark. “Don’t you think it would be real George if every time our swords touched fire would fly?”

"Real George" is a phrase I've never heard before; perhaps it was common among teenagers in 1956. Today they'd probably say, "Wouldn't it be da bomb if every time our swords touched fire would fly?" (Alas, the techie trick in question—connecting a neon-sign transformer to their swords for a sword fight in a school play—would now get them thrown out of school.)

Carl & Jerry's late creator John T. Frye really took me by surprise in only one respect: He loved the words "lugubrious" and "lugubriously." The word (in its various forms) is used six or seven times in the Carl & Jerry canon. Here are some examples:

Carl slumped against the doorjamb and said lugubriously, "I've been afraid of this. The mad genius has finally flipped his lid. That's what comes of reading physics texts and tube manuals instead of comic books like any other red-blooded American boy. I'm a little disappointed, though, in the lack of originality. Old Diogenes used that carrying-a-light-in-the-daytime routine several centuries ago."

"Guess I'm the one guy in ten for whom it won't work," Jerry said with a lugubrious sigh as he shut off the equipment and removed the earphones.

Jerry flipped off the switch on the recorder control, and the voice slowly coasted to a stop. "There goes the sku-n--n----n-----nk!" it said lugubriously.

I'm not sure I've seen the word since I was in college 35 years ago, and I know I've never heard it spoken aloud. The oddness is amplified by the fact that Frye did not have the polished articulation that his contemporary John Daly of "What's My Line?" had. Fifty-dollar words like "lugubriously" don't often travel alone. I would have expected to see "tergiversation" or "contumaciousness" on its arm now and then, but no. All the rest of the text is strikingly ordinary.

No conclusions can be drawn here, except for the obvious: Personalities are reflected in their writing. If I've learned anything in 25 years as an editor I've learned that. I would like to have known John T. Frye, or at least spent an hour or two with him to get his short-form bio. He may have known a lot of cool words, and kept them all out of his fiction except for "lugubrious." Maybe he thought it was ordinary. (Perhaps they used it a lot in central Indiana.) Maybe it was an inside joke with one of his editors, as the word "cerate" was between me and the man who edited Turbo Pascal Solutions. (It was an easy typo for "create," and he asked me once, "You really did want to tell the reader to coat that linked list with wax, didn't you?") Or maybe, like a lot of techies, he was simply an eccentric who liked certain words more than others. Alas, (Jeff thought lugubriously) I suspect that we will never know.

I'm behind on the third volume of Carl and Jerry: Their Complete Adventures, though there's some sparse chance I may still get it mounted on Lulu before the end of May. The 24 stories in the volume (the years 1959 and 1960) have all been scanned and OCRed. The text has been cleaned up and laid out. The last step, though, is a lulu: Scanning all the illustrations and adding them to the layout.

It's more difficult with Volume 3 than the first two volumes for this reason: With the May 1959 issue, Popular Electronics went to a coated paper and a finer halftone screen for all the artwork. Prior to that issue, PE had used a pulpy paper and relatively course screens that actually remind me more of woodcuts. The early screens are coarse enough so that the artwork does not generate Moire patterns when printed on Lulu's 600 DPI print-on-demand machines.

The Carl and Jerry illos post-April 1959 are smaller and slightly softer compared to the earlier ones. (They remind me of watercolors, even though they are all reproduced in b/w.) Even scanning them at 1200 DPI and enlarging them on the page leaves horrendous Moire interference. There's no choice but to eliminate the halftone screens. This is what I have to begin with, enlarged to show the screen:

Note that it's only a small part of a much larger drawing. Below is what I need to have when I'm done. It's a little fuzzy because it's significantly enlarged; it does look fairly decent when printed at its intended size:

This is a skill I've never needed and had to develop. I've had a copy of Photoshop 5.5 in a box since 1999 and never needed it—anything I needed to do with bitmapped images I did in Paint Shop Pro. Simple in concept: Blur out the image to submerge the halftones into continuous tones, then sharpen it to get your lines and edges back. What I found is that there were complications:

1. You have to adjust the b/w levels before you do anything else. This is a surprisingly touchy business with fine screens and, worse, it has to be custom-adjusted for each image. Just getting this knack under my hat took a couple of days of loose moments playing around with the scans.
2. A surprising number of my magazines are literally moldy, especially the 1959 year. I bought most of them as a lot on eBay, and the stack had evidently been sitting on somebody's basement floor since Buddy Holly was first-run. There is water damage on some of the pages, most of which are a little wavy.The mold isn't everywhere, but it ended up on a couple of the illos, making it look like Carl has acne. Alas, his sweater looks like it has acne too. Touching all that up would take forever, so although I did my best, Volume 3 will have some mold spots. I won't tell you where they are, since it's my fervent desire that you consider them artistic flourishes.

If it weren't for that, I might be done by now—that, and the fact that I have misplaced the December 1959 issue and am currently tearing up the house looking for it. It's here somewhere, and in the meantime I'm full speed ahead scanning the rest of the illos—as many as five per story. It's turning out to be a much bigger job than I anticipated when I decided to do it last summer, but the people who have bought the books have been delighted.

I guess if it had been easy, well, someone else would have done it long ago.