Question

Every now and then, usually between eight and ten in the evening, Jacques finds himself transforming into a small furry rodent with a bushy tail.

On one hand, Jacques is quite glad that he doesn’t have classic lycanthropy. Turning into a squirrel tends to cause fewer problems than turning into a wolf. Instead of having to worry about accidentally eating the neighbor (that would be awkward), he worries about being eaten by the neighbor’s cat. After two occasions where he woke up on a precariously thin branch in the crown of an oak, naked and disoriented, he has taken to locking the doors and windows of his room at night and putting a few walnuts on the floor to keep himself busy.

That takes care of the cat and oak problems. But Jacques still suffers from his condition. The irregular occurrences of the transformation make him suspect that they might be triggered by something. For a while, he believed that it happened only on days when he had touched trees. So he stopped touching trees entirely and even avoided going near them. But the problem persisted.

Switching to a more scientific approach, Jacques intends to start keeping a daily log of everything he did that day and whether he changed form. With this data he hopes to narrow down the conditions that trigger the transformations.

The first thing he does is design a data structure to store this information.

This is a book about getting computers to do what you want them to do. Computers are about as common as screwdrivers today, but they contain a lot more hidden complexity and thus are harder to operate and understand. To many, they remain alien, slightly threatening things.