Roesser Family Fireside Chat

Episode One

It was a cold and snowy fall, here at the Roesser East household. The hunting was difficult and the driving was downright treacherous. So we spend our time in cyberspace, where the air is always clear, even if our minds are not always so.

Suddenly and without warning a stream of information began emanating from cyberspace that was so intense and gripping that we didn't need a browser to sense it. We looked at one another in stark terror and without verbalizing it asked each other what could be the source of this nerve-shaking disturbance? Then slowly the answer began to appear ...

Indeed, the answer did appear, in fact the answer was there all along but we did not see it for what it was. We were afraid and confused.

We had good reason to be both afraid and confused, for there before us was the terrifying answer. We tried to deny it but to no avail. It had a grip on us that far exceeded our feeble attempts of escaping it. We knew that there was no alternative but to face it. But how should we approach it and who should make the first move?

Of course, not everyone was fearful. Some were just confused but not afraid, while others were very clear but definitely anxious. Lest we forget, however, we are the Roesser's (and relatives thereof), so we don't let fear and/or confusion rule our lives. After all, what possible force could emanate from the ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere that could be so bad?

But was it from the ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere? How could we be sure? Each one of us reached back to our school days in Physics, General Science or Applied Home Economics struggling to remember what it was the teacher was saying about the itsnstdas. Oh, if only we paid more attention at the time! We lamented over our lack of wisdom and remonstrated ourselves for foolishly wasting that opportunity to learn what was so critically important to us now. Then we thought if only Pa Roesser was here, he could help. If he could instantly recall the definition of cement, he surely should remember the distinguishing characteristics of itsnstdas. Our collective mind then went to Uncle Harold, clearly he could help if only he were here. Of course, none of these thoughts helped. We were faced with the phenomenon here and now and we had to deal with it ourselves!

The dilemna grew more serious by the day, since even though we don't really understand the itsnstdas, we know that the vibrations accelerate when a full moon approaches. Sister Mary Gerald tried to warn us frequently. She would stand at the exit at the end of the school day, proclaiming fervently that we must beware of the itsnstdas during full moons. I vaguely remember my college physics teacher explaining that it has something to do with the gravitational effect on the fat electrons. Or, was that Pa's theory?

It then dawned on us - it's not what we were taught in our high school and college science courses that would be the key to understanding this menace but the fundamentals taught to us in grammar school. The problem wasn't chemical, physical or even biological. It was arithmetical. Simple basic arithmetic. That should have occurred to us sooner for this phenomenon that we were witnessing was a recurance of of a recent similar incident that affected every single Pentium processor. Then it manifested itself as erroneous results for certain arithmetical operations that proved devastating throughout engineering, science and commerce. But now it has taken an even more hideous form. Frantically, we tried to recall our times tables.

Of, course, with all of the misinformation about arithmetic we learned in school, like trying to tell us that pies are square, etc., it's no wonder we got confused.

Just then the doorbell rang, shattering the tense silence that had engulfed us. It was the Domino's pizza delivery boy with a deep-dish square pizza pie. We protested that we had ordered a round pizza pie. The delivery boy apologized profusely and explained that he had gone to the same grammar school as us and learned that pie are squared, which is not only wrong but very bad grammer.

Speaking of our grammer, I'm afraid she would be very upset about our grammar, and our spelling.

Yes, spelling is a weakness of some of us, but that's not the problem. The problem is arithmetic. While eating our pizza we keep contemplating whether pie are squared or rounded. We know full well from early experience that pies are round, everybody knows that - but what does that mean arithmetically? That thought kept nagging at us until finally the meaning hit us smack in the face. Of course, when you round a number you simply drop the fractional part, thus to say pie are rounded (or is rounded to be more grammatically correct) means to represent pi by the number 3. Now, we felt we were getting someplace - but where?

Following the above logic, we concluded that another long-held truth i.e. that cornbreads are square, while being so geometrically, is not necessarily so arithmetically. For example, if you follow Buck's original new and improved raisin nut cornbread recipe, you will get about 2.2 cornbreads. But since you are only going to bake this mess in a whole number of pans, you must round off the cornbreads to the number of pans. Thus cornbreads are both ROUND and SQUARE! Now we are really confused!

While we were puzzling over this Buck decided to whip up a batch of his famous cornbread to go with our pizza. Sure enough, the recipe produced enough batter for 2.2 cornbreads, but he baked it in two pans. Someone asked, I think it was George, what happened to the extra .2 cornbreads of batter? Also, Then he asked, what is the error in rounding pi to 3. To that Bob volunteered if pi is 3.14 than the error is .14. Quickly Buck retorted, your still rounding, I happen to have found pi to 10000 places. Then what is the error in rounding pi demanded Mrs Buck. At that we all began to sense that the answer to this last question would lead us to the resolution of the pending problem.

Of course it would, but the sad fact is that there is no answer to this problem, because pi having an infinite number of decimal places, (Buck knows 10235 of them by heart),it is impossible to make a perfect circle. If you put apples and crust in what appears to be a round pan, it will come out OVAL, because the engineers who designed the pan fudged when they multiplied it's diameter by some rounded off value of pi. So the real problem is, who will get the wedge of pie from the elongated side ot the pan? My instincts lead me to believe George has had this one figured out for years.

That's it!! Buck did discover what George knew for years, but was keeping to himself. In fact many scientists, mathematicians and even engineers knew it and were trying to do something about it. First engineers programed powerful computers to determine ever more digits of pi, but there was still infinite more digits to be found. So they looked for more powerful computers. Certain biologists devised neural computers that would spread out organically and collectively become more powerful, allowing digits of pi to be determined faster, but still there remained an infinite number. Mathematicians devised the internet for this expressed purpose so that all of the computers throughout the world could work together on computing pi. Of course this was to no avail. So physicists attempted to implement the ultimate distributed computer. They exposed certain atoms to a specific frequency of itsnstdas energy, which programed them not only to work on the computation of pi but to also propagate this program to other atoms. Soon every atom on Earth was involved in this computation that would inevitably prove futile. This was the cause of the stream of information that permeated our senses. Buck confirmed this when upon second look he recognised a segment of the information as the 9867th thru the 10456th digit of pi. A cold chill ran down our spines! This has to be stopped before our entire world, indeed our entire universe, would be consumed. But how?

We can't change pi, in fact we don't even know exactly how much pi is. So, our only hope is to neutralize the ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere. This will be a formidable task, as is spelling it.

Hastely but deftly Mrs Buck entered ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere into the Alta Vista search engine. Nervously, we waited the results. We needed to find out everything we could about itsnstdas if we stood a chance of neutralizing it. This ray of hope was quickly dashed. We were too late, the perpetrators at Digital Equipment anticipated this attempt. Our skin began to crawl as we viewed the result of are search: "word ignored, zero matches". We did all we could to hold back our panic!

But wait a second, Buck just noticed that she inadvertently typed in ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdifusionatrosphere instead of ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere. No wonder there was no match.

Taking pains to enter the exact spelling "ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere" this time Mrs.Buck received a totally different but equally distressing response from cyberspace. The response was "785992 responses found, please re-submit with a more specific term" We don't know any more specific term for the ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere. The itsnstdas is the itsnstdas!

We decided we better contemplate this situation a little further, so we settled back and had some more of Buck's Original Famous New and Improved Walnut Raisin Corn Bread. It was Mark that then said well why don't we try some of the other search engines? Great Idea! we all exclaimed in unison. So one after another we tried Infoseek, Yahoo, Inkatomi, Web Crawler, Excite, Point, and a few others that we haven't seen before. Alas, all produced similar results. Then Pete sprang forward with the idea that we use object-oriented programming with dynamically linked libraries and a hyper-class table hashing lookup scheme to write our own special-purpose search engine to handle our specific need. We all agreed that was the right approach, but first we had some more of Buck's Original Famous New and Improved Walnut Raisin Corn Bread.

You can't beat BOFNIWRCB (which is square) when you want to kick back and do some heavy thinking. We could wash it down with some of Uncle Bobby's Mackinaw Fudge ripoff, but the last I heard, Linda was still in her kitchen trying to make a batch without burning it like she did the first seven tries.

While we were waiting for Linda, who we fully trusted since after all she is a home economics major, to finish a batch of Uncle Bobby's Delicious Mackinaw Fudge Ripoff the door bell rang out again. After we recollected ourselves we debated who should be the one to answer the door. We didn't know who it might be. Aunt Pat mustered enough courage to volunteer. It was Elsie Spitznagle. She explained that her father finally managed to drive their Ford up the candy hill on the other side of East Aurora and scarf up enough chocolates and other candy to fill there trunk and back seat. She wanted to share some with us, especially Nancy because her father was never able to make it all the way up the hill.

Elsie went on to say that she and her husband, Stooney Hedderts have been retired from their rural pizza delivery jobs for a year and a half now. They still enjoy a quiet ride in the country now and then, especially since their new Ford can make it up the candy hill easily. They had attempted that hill hundreds of times previously in GM cars, but never were successful.

Uncle Bob smarted from this last remark, but no matter we had a much more important problem at hand from which we digressed. Pete finished the algorithm for the custom search engine that we needed but had yet to choose the programming language that would be most appropriate in which to write it. We decided we would take a vote but first we had some Buck's Original Famous New and Improved Walnut Raisin Corn Bread topped with Uncle Bobby's Delicious Mackinaw Fudge Ripoff that Linda never got to solidify.

Buck suggested that the search program be written in C++, since that was his usual grade in college.

Aunt Nancy brought up Turtle Graphics, George alluded to Lotus 1-2-3, several people mused over Basic but differed whether it sould be Quick Basic, Apple Basic or Visual Basic, Mike wanted some sort of Assembly Language, Bob preferred Fortran, Eileen thought TCP would be good and Mrs Buck said why not HTML. Others brought up but quickly dismissed Algol, Pascal, PL1, and APL. After much debate we finally settled on C++ afterall.

Carrie suggested that we do it in Swahili.

Carrie's suggestion was well received. Yes, that definitely was an interesting idea and we decided to pursue it. Jim M. (Mugs) threw out the idea that we go one step further and write it in Swahili++, that way we can still incorporate object-oriented programing. Yeah, that's it! we all chimed in. Wait a minute! wait a minute shot out Mark D., isn't Swahili++ the prototype for C++? That fact was quickly confirmed with a simple search performed by Web Crawler. So we came full circle.

Buck concurred that we had come full circle, yet the question he pondered was "Unaenda wapi?" with this.

While he was pondering this, something in the back of his mind suggested mahindi mkate! Meanwhile Pete was making great progress in programming the search engine using Swahili++. There were some subtile differences with C++, but he was able to resolve them by referring to the Swahili dictionary project.

Pete made sure to include enough artificial intelligence in the program to sort out the myriad responses to a itsnstda query and provide only that information pertinent to our problem. Soon the program was done and we were ready to test it by clicking on the button:
Search

We all stared at the response. It was Georgie that first replied: C6H12O6, isn't that sugar - glucose to be exact. Yes said Linda, remembering from her home economics class, but how can be get sugar molecules to generate dextrorotatory waves. From the dictionary we found that dextrose is a form of glucose that is characterized by its ability to do just that - generate dextrorotatory waves. Ray then uttered isn't dextrose found in certain types of grain - where can we find some and how can we suspend it in an amorphous matrix of complex hydrocarbons? Just then George reached for the last piece of Buck's Original Famous New and Improved Walnut Raisin Corn Bread.

Aside from the lack of cornbread, Buck felt we had everything under control now. What with his vast beer and winemaking experience, making an amorhic suspension of complex carbohydrates would be a snap. Just get about 20 pounds of barley, yeast, some hallertau hops and some water. First we have to malt the barley, (Linda volunteered to do this) then cook it up with the hops and water. Then we let it ferment for a week and bottle it. After a month we have some of the finest tasting amorphous matrices of complex carbohydrates and dextrose you can imagine. The dextrorotary waves will be flowing like crazy. And if it doesn't work, we will drink it all and who cares?

Oh No! Buck blew it!

Having been no more than a C++ student in chemistry, he forgot that the dextrose in the concoction would turn into alcohol, making it useless as an anti-Ionotronicstratonuclearsubtransdiffusionatrosphere substance. This was getting serious.

You bet it was getting serious! To some of us, who are tea-totalers, fermented dextrose would be useless. In fact, worse than useless - not only would we have to put up with the unrelenting generation of an irrational number but also the unrelenting ranting of irrational relatives.

To which George quickly pointed out, of course there are a certain few relatives who rave on unrelentlessly even without the benefit of fermented beverages!!

We all reluctantly agreed with George and lamented that along with being pied we had to forebear those that were obnoxiously pie-eyed or overbearingly pious.

The debate continued over which group of relatives rants more. Meanwhile, Linda was in the kitchen attempting for the 848th time to get Uncle Bobby's Mackinaw Fudge Ripoff to turn out. But alas, as it had the previous 847 times, the recipe produced only a runny, gooey mess which could only be consumed with the aid of a spoon. "Darn, she lamented, if only I could make the dextrose in this amorphous matrix of complex carbohydrates crystallize, I would have FUDGE!" As she spoke, the group all realized what she had just said! Could FUDGE be the answer to the isntnsdas problem???

Yes fudge must be the answer to our conundrum. It is so ironic and appropriate that this menace that arose from the need to fudge pi would be conquered by fudge! Then a sense of sobriety came over us when we realized there were only enough ingredients left to attempt one more batch, the 849th. It was imperative that we do not fail. We all consoled Linda trying to build up her spirits and condition her for this challenge for which failure was unacceptable.

As she prepared to try still another batch of "the Fudge", we all checked her recipe and list of ingredients carefully. But something was wrong, terribly wrong. Instead of butter, it seems she had been substituting "I can't believe it's not butter!". So the dextrose never crystallized to the point of producing the needed dextrorotatory wav es to defeat the isntsndas. We made a quick trip to the store for real butter and stood by anxiously as the corrected recipe was started.

She painstakinly measured out each ingredient and gently blended them together in the pan. We tried to reassure her. No pressure! no pressure we keep repeating to her. We knew we were lying. She applied heat and tenderly stirred the mixture. Soon it came to a boil and everything seemed to be going well. The aroma was tantalizing. George walked over carrying his beer and munching on the last piece of corn bread in order to get a whiff. Oh no! he accidently dropped his corn bread in to the bubbling mixture. In trying to retrieve it he spilled his beer into the mixture also.

The instant the beer hit the fudge, an ionic transmogularfumination cascade occurred. The result was instantaneous crystallization of the dextrose with a concomitant release of massive numbers of dextrorotatory waves, obliterating all traces of the i tsnsndas energy fields. The universe was saved!!!

The End

Stay tuned for the second episode of Fireside Chat