Eclectic Views

    
This topic is mainly for my personal e-zine, Silicon Soapware, although I
may post other things here as well.  WELL members are welcome to post
comments.

For non-WELL people who wish to comment, I also run an email list.  For
the URL to join, look in any recent issue of the zine.  

For the complete archive, look in 

 http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SSList.html

If that URL ever changes, look in a recent issue for the URL for my main 
page and go from there.  
  

    
Let's start with the second "century" of SS, with issue #101:

                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #101
                        New Moon of April 1, 2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

You've probably all heard the little rhyme about what boys and girls are 
made of:  Sugar and spice and everything nice for girls, but snips and 
snails and puppy-dog tails for boys.  

Problem is, it doesn't cover all the bases.  Nowadays, what with growing 
public acceptance of alternative sexualities, I'm wondering about the 
transgendered, hermaphrodites, third-gender shamans, and other such new 
categories, many of which I probably haven't even heard of yet.  What are 
they made of?  And what other as yet unknown genders might be possible?  

I think it depends on what combinations of ingredients are allowed.  

Are we limited to the traditional six ingredients, in a strict format of 
"One from Column A, one from Column B, and one from Column C"?  If so, 
then there are only eight possibilities.  If, on the other hand, one can 
have any combination of any or all of the six then there are sixty-four 
possible mixes, although the one with no ingredients may not be very 
interesting.  Or maybe we need exactly three of the six, but are free to 
choose any three.  There are twenty ways to do that.  

And are other ingredients allowed?  If so, do they have to rhyme with the 
ones they replace?  Do they have to have similar initial consonants so as 
to preserve alliteration?  We just don't know.  We also don't know the 
relative proportions of the various items, and what effect that has.  

Clearly, more research is needed, on several fronts.  

First, we need to gather more data.  Are all girls really made of sugar 
and spice and everything nice, with all boys being made of snips and 
snails and puppy-dog tails, or are there some in whom these ingredients 
differ?  And if the ingredients do vary, are the variations associated 
with any observable physiological or behavioral traits?  

Unfortunately, we do not yet have the technology to screen large numbers 
of people for this kind of thing.  So before we can amass a statistically 
significant database we need to develop better analysis techniques and 
equipment.  The vast pool of unemployed talent in Silicon Valley might be 
able to accomplish this, but they would need funding.  And in the current 
climate of recession plus war, funding may be difficult to get.  

Another possible line of research might involve animal models.  That 
would let us do experiments that would not be allowed on humans.  But do 
we know what male and female mice or guinea pigs or whatever are made of?  
And again, we have the problem of funding.  

Perhaps we can take advantage of the war situation:  If, for example, one 
combatant were to spray the other side's troops with Everything Nice, 
would the victims follow the gender stereotype and become less inclined 
to fight?  In the event of an Everything Nice attack, would Puppy-Dog 
Tails be an effective antidote?  Even if we are prohibited by the Geneva 
Convention from using this type of weapon, we still need to be able to 
defend against it if others use it on us.  So research in this area is 
desperately needed, on a wartime crash-priority basis.  

I'm just an engineer, with no experience in writing grant applications or 
organizing scientific research projects.  So if you're experienced in 
those areas and want to help, please contact me.  


                          *********************

"I laughed so hard I snorted coffee out of my nose all over the keyboard.  
And that was very odd, because I was drinking Pepsi."


                          *********************

I have an old spring-wound alarm clock that seems to have gone wonky.  I 
hadn't used it for a while, and after I took it out of storage and wound 
it up it started gaining an hour or more a day.  

But it just occurred to me that it may not actually be broken.  Maybe 
what's really happened is that the rotation of the Earth has slowed, and 
They are keeping it secret and beaming some kind of hidden signals to 
slow down all the electronic clocks and watches in the world to match.  
People may notice that their work day seems to drag on longer, but nobody 
has any real evidence to point to because there are so few spring-wound 
non-electronic clocks left.  

So does anybody else reading this have a spring-wound non-electronic 
clock?  If so, does it agree with your electronic timepieces?  


                          *********************

Speaking of technologies that were common in years past but are now 
vanishing, how many of you have pressure cookers in your kitchens?  How 
many of your parents or grandparents had them?  

There was sort of a fad for pressure cookers around the early 1950's.  My 
parents had one, and there were a fair number of jokes about them in the 
funny papers and on TV situation comedies.  And then they sort of faded 
from use and from public consciousness.  I recall seeing my parents using 
the bottom part as just another ordinary pot, but I don't recall seeing 
it used as a pressure cooker once the novelty of it wore off.  

So why did pressure cookers fade from home kitchens?  Safety?  Despite 
jokes about them blowing up, I suspect there was really little danger 
since the one we had did have redundant safety features.  And they could 
have become even safer over time had the technology remained in demand.  

I suspect the real reason was that the main benefit, being able to cook 
some foods somewhat faster, was fairly minor compared to the cost and the 
hassle.  Also, you couldn't stir foods while cooking, and you couldn't 
watch while the cooking was going on.  And they were only good for things 
you wanted to boil or steam.  You couldn't use them for baking or frying, 
or defrosting processed frozen foods like those newfangled TV dinners.  

I think their limited applicability was what did them in.  They're still 
used in commercial food processing, but they were too specialized to 
appeal to very many homemakers.  

Microwave ovens, on the other hand, were useful for more different types 
of tasks and were simpler to deal with.  And even though there are real 
dangers if too much microwave energy escapes from the oven, the hazards 
are more abstract and harder to portray in situation comedies than 
explosions with food all over the kitchen ceiling.  

And now, with the market going more and more to processed foods and fewer 
people cooking from scratch, there is even less need for pressure cookers 
in the home.  There will probably always be a few people using them for 
specialized tasks like home canning, but they're unlikely to ever become 
common again.  


                          *********************

Thoughts of how pressure cookers failed to catch on among American 
homemakers leads me to think of other technologies we'll probably never 
see in the home.  

One that comes to mind is tiny x-ray machines at the dinner table so you 
can x-ray your fish for bones, bite by bite.  You could do other things 
with it as well, such as finding out which chocolates have nut centers 
and which don't.  But even with those other uses, it'll probably never 
catch on.  

It would be expensive to develop, especially with having to put in enough 
safety features to satisfy the gov't, and even if you can make it safe 
much of the public is paranoid about "radiation".  Since the benefits of 
the device are rather small compared to the costs, it will probably never 
come to the mass market.  

So that's another item I probably shouldn't be trying to push as a 
Silicon Valley start-up.  


                          *********************

There's also the bit of not-too-promising technology I dreamed about one 
night recently.  I had a mitten whose palm area was full of heating 
elements so I could cook food just by holding or touching it.  There was 
insulation inside under the heaters so my hands wouldn't get too hot.  I 
think I could also burn lumps of coal that way.  

In the dream I thought this was an old idea I'd thought of previously, 
but that seeming memory may have also been part of the dream.  

In any event, I suspect the commercial potential is quite limited, not 
worth trying to seek out major investors for.  


                          *********************

We just had Equinox a week or two ago.  Winter is winding down and spring 
is springing forth.  While there may still be ice in colder parts of the 
country, it's on its way out.  And the art piece of sculptured ice 
skaters that graced a little parkway near here during the holidays is 
long gone.  

All this somehow got me to wondering about a comic-book cliche:  Some 
ice-skaters or fishermen or some such go out on a frozen lake.  Near the 
middle of the lake is a sign:  DANGER -- THIN ICE.  Someone ventures too 
close to the sign, whereupon the ice breaks and they fall in, or suffer 
some other comic-book fate.  

This got me to wondering about that THIN ICE sign.  How does the person 
who puts it up every winter avoid the same fate as the skaters who 
venture too near it later on?  Or does he avoid it?  Falling in may not 
be all that bad if you know in advance when it's going to happen, so they 
can have the Rescue Squad and fresh dry clothes and all that good stuff 
waiting.  

Thing is, you never see the THIN ICE sign being put up, so there's no way 
of knowing how it's done.  

And what happens later on in spring when the ice is almost completely 
gone?  Does someone somehow take the sign and put it in storage for the 
summer?  Or is it just left to sink when the ice finally melts, with a 
new sign being put up every year?  

If it's just left there, then as the centuries pass won't the lake 
eventually fill up with THIN ICE signs?  

Or maybe they take a middle course:  Let the sign sink, but then sometime 
around late summer or early fall, just before the lake starts to freeze 
again, send a diver down to retrieve it.  That would minimize the time 
they would need to pay for storage space for it.  

So does anybody know how they really do it?  


                          *********************

There's a street near here that reminds me of some Fifties and early 
Sixties science fiction.  

It's a long block of duplexes, all apparently built by one developer.  
There are three or four different front facades, combined in various ways 
with three or four different designs for the rest of the building, so 
that no two of the ten or so houses are exactly alike.  But the overall 
effect is still one of cookie-cutter conformity.  

As I said, I'm reminded of science fiction from the Fifties and early 
Sixties where a common theme was persecution of whoever was Different 
from "Normal".  Maybe the neighbors and/or the authorities thought the 
protagonist was a Communist or something when in reality he was just 
someone who liked to think too much.  Or maybe he had better things to do 
with his money than buy all the latest consumer status symbols.  Or he 
didn't watch enough TV and didn't like the top-rated shows.  Be the 
details as they may, if you dared deviate from the norm, you were likely 
to end up in Big Trouble.  

This conformity theme may not have been prominent in the best-selling 
novels of the time, but it did show up in quite a few short stories in 
the science fiction magazines.  

Then all that pent-up individualism burst free into the Psychedelic 
Sixties.  

So what themes in today's science fiction might be pointing to the next 
big wave of social change?  


                          *********************


                            Alternate Routes

He was crazy.
We all knew that.
All his talk of strange exotic lands 
     he would someday run away to proved it,
Since it was well known
That here was the only place there was.
Still, he could be quite convincing
So we had to keep reminding ourselves
That he was crazy.

Further proof:
One night late, driving home from a party or something,
As he approached the curve in the road
We saw him signal to turn right.
He tried to explain about another road to the left
They had taught us not to see
But that only proved
How crazy he was.

And so we went,
Being careful not to look too hard as we passed the curve,
Until
One night late, driving home from a party or something,
As he approached the curve in the road
We saw him signal to turn left
And vanish.  

We all stood there, 
Telling each other that we could see,
Way down in the canyon,
His flaming wreckage.
I felt it best not to mention
That to me the faint red glow
Looked more like tail lights
Dwindling toward the horizon.


                                        Thomas G. Digby
                                        written 0420 hr  5/17/80
                                        entered 2115 hr  2/08/92


                          *********************

               HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU

If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is 

  ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net 

you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address 
will be posted.  That's the one you want if you like conversation.  
There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to 
almost nothing in between.  Any post can spark a new flurry at any time.  

If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're 
getting the BCC version.  That's the one for those who want just Silicon 
Soapware with no banter.  The zine content is the same for both.  

To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to  

 http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi

and select the ss_talk list.  Enter your email address in the space 
provided and hit Signup.  When you receive an email confirmation request 
go to the URL it will give you.  (If you're already on the list and want 
to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list 
posting you receive.) 

To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or 
bubbles@well.com).  I currently do that one manually.  


                                -- END --
  

    
Hot damn! Excellent addition to pre.vue.  Welcome, bubbles.
  

    
> spray the other side's troops with Everything Nice

Or tell them the Irresistible Joke.
  

    
Pressure cookers have recently made a comeback. I almost bought one a
few years ago, but realized I didn't need another kitchen gadget.
  

    
My mama's pressure cooker always scared the hell out of me. Always
seemed on the verge of blowing the house up.
  

    
They have much improved safety valves now.
  

    
                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #102
                         New Moon of May 1, 2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

This New Moon is on May Day, and that reminds me of a conversation at a 
recent social event.  One of the people I was talking with was a school 
teacher, and when the subject of May Day came up she said that they don't 
do Maypoles in public schools nowadays.  Too many people would object on 
religious grounds.  

That reminded me that back when I was little we did have Maypoles at 
school, and they had little or no religious significance.  A Maypole was 
just a thing people did to celebrate the season, like "Trick or Treat" 
for Halloween or turkey dinner for Thanksgiving.  If any of the adults 
were aware of the fertility symbolism of the Maypole they didn't tell us 
innocent children.  

I think my first Maypole experience was in kindergarten.  I have this 
memory fragment of a bunch of us kids holding ribbons that were attached 
to some kind of tall pole.  In retrospect it was probably a Maypole, 
although I suspect I didn't understand what was going on at the time.  

They also had one when I was in first grade, but I missed it.  I have 
this memory of being driven off in the car and looking back and seeing 
the other children standing around a pole holding ribbons.  I think I was 
being taken to the hospital to have my tonsils out.  

As far as I can recall they didn't have one the years I was in second and 
third grades.  May Day would have been on a weekend, although I don't 
know whether that was the reason.  

Then one year they did put up a Maypole, but the ceremony got rained out.  
Or maybe there was a thunderstorm, and they didn't want to take a chance 
with a tall pole and lightning.  Be that as it may, I recall being inside 
looking out through the window at the pole with its brightly colored 
ribbons under the threatening skies, and I recall that we never did get 
to actually do anything that May Day.  

Then the school quit having Maypoles.  This would have been the early 
1950's.  Was that when the Soviets started taking over May Day as a big 
military parade day?  I recall seeing pictures of May Day military 
parades on TV and in the papers, but few if any mentions of Maypoles.  
Maybe celebrating May Day had become somehow unpatriotic?  

Nobody seemed to be interested in doing Maypoles in college either.  

My next experience with Maypoles came after I got into Paganism.  
Nowadays Pagans and Witches and such do them, but public schools don't.  
Apparently the Maypole now belongs to that specific set of religions, so 
it's no longer allowable in the supposedly religiously neutral public 
schools.  

How things have changed.  


                          *********************

Something reminded me of the cartoon cliche of the hole in the bridge or 
whatever, with cartoon characters walking right across on thin air as 
long as they don't look down.  So some blind guy has a seeing-eye duck 
that can fly across such gaps, so he never notices the difference.  


                          *********************

This neighborhood has overhead phone lines and TV cables, some of which 
are visible from my window.  And as I sit at my computer I now and then 
see a squirrel running along the wires.  Do they have no fear of heights?  
Squirrels are fairly small, so falling from that height may not hurt 
them, for square-cube reasons.  And they seem pretty secure up there, 
what with their claws and all.  

In other places I've seen rats walking along overhead phone wires.  If a 
rat meets a squirrel on a wire, who gets the right of way?  Does it go by 
species, or direction of travel, or what?  

Now part of me is wondering if squirrels and rats and any other animals 
that travel along overhead wires might benefit from something like a 
railroad dispatcher to avoid right-of-way conflicts when two animals want 
to go in opposite directions on the same wire.  

One problem is language:  How does the dispatcher communicate with the 
traffic?  Maybe play the relevant animal noises for "come here" or "stay 
back"?  Or put nozzles around to spray pheromones to signal "Go" and 
"Don't Go"?  

Another problem is when an animal is already on a wire and then changes 
its mind about which way it wants to go.  That could really mess up 
traffic.  Does it happen often?  I think it does happen sometimes, such 
as when an animal sees a potential mate going the other way on another 
wire.  So we'll need some way to discourage that, or at least detect it 
and notify other traffic accordingly.  

An even bigger question is why bother in the first place?  The animals 
seem to be muddling through OK with the present non-system, at least with 
the rather low levels of traffic I see from my window.  

Deciding not to bother also solves the problem of how to pay for it.  The 
audio system for playing animal noises, along with that pheromone spray 
stuff, would probably cost a fair amount of money, not to mention 
operators' salaries and other expenses.  So there's a lot to be said for 
just letting the animals handle it themselves.  

But might there be reasons to do it, even with the problems?  Perhaps it 
would be a way to create jobs to boost the economy out of its present 
slump.  Nationwide there would be millions of openings for squirrel 
dispatchers, not to mention the business that could be generated building 
the equipment, so it could be a big economic boost.  

And the jobs don't need much in the way of special qualifications.  It's 
not like railroad dispatching or air traffic control, where a collision 
is Really Bad News.  So what if a squirrel gets into a fight or falls off 
a phone wire now and then?  It has a good chance of escaping uninjured, 
and even if it doesn't, what's one squirrel more or less?  So it's the 
kind of job almost anybody could do, even if they're not very good at it.  

Of course if the squirrel falls into the path of something like a 
Presidential motorcade, and the limo driver swerves to avoid it and ends 
up killing several bigwigs, that could be a problem.  But they could 
always put in temporary special operators for that kind of thing, so it's 
not a reason not to proceed with the program.  

So if you think this is a good idea to help the economy, write your 
Congressperson today.  


                          *********************

A few days ago the news from Iraq was about how we'd gotten hold of some 
Iraqi bigwig's personal phone book, with numbers for other high officials 
and such.  

Part of me wants to give the phone book to telemarketers.  That might be 
worse than anything our military could do to them.  Or would that violate 
the Geneva Convention?  


                          *********************

"The concept of gloobulon is hereby abolished."  -- Official Decree

Q:  What does "gloobulon" mean?  I'm not familiar with that word.  

A:  It doesn't mean anything.  The concept that it used to be the word 
for has been abolished.  

Q:  So it used to mean something?  

A:  Yes, at one time it did.  

Q:  So why don't I remember what it used to refer to?  

A:  Because you are a loyal subject of our Leader.  When the abolition 
decree came out, you immediately purged all memory of the former concept 
of gloobulon from your mind.  

Q:  But shouldn't I still be able to look it up in dictionaries and such?  

A:  Not really.  It is said that even the stars in the sky move in 
accordance with the will of our Leader.  So when the concept that the 
word gloobulon once referred to was abolished, it instantly vanished from 
all books and other documents, just as it faded from your memory.  

Q:  So how do I know there was ever such a thing as gloobulon in the 
first place?  

A:  Because our Leader says so.  


                          *********************

One email list I'm on has been having a flap about astrology and related 
matters.  Somebody posted something about seeing more snafus and such 
because Mercury was about to go retrograde, whereupon someone else 
responded with a rather scathing rant against "pseudo-science".  He went 
on at some length about how astrology was just a bunch of baloney 
(although he used a less polite word than "baloney").  

The original poster replied along the lines of "Astrology may be false 
for you, but it works for me," whereupon the other replied with 
"Astrology is false for everyone, including you, and you're just deluding 
yourself if you believe otherwise."  He then went into a discussion of 
how there is no plausible physical mechanism by which it can work, so 
therefore it must not work.  

I then chimed in with a few points.  

First, how do we know that what we think of as "reality" is real?  It 
seems real, and it usually works to our advantage to assume it's real, 
but do we really Know?  Perhaps I'm really some kind of creature that the 
present "me" has never heard of, somewhere off in the Fifth Zfexlthrop 
Dimension, and that creature is just dreaming that it is me.  If that's 
the case, how would "I" know it before the dreamer woke up?  I probably 
wouldn't.  

Or maybe we're the gods playing some game akin to "Dungeons and Dragons" 
to while away eternity.  If so, what can the characters (as opposed to 
the players) know about the rules of the game?  

And even if we are who we think we are and the world is pretty much what 
we think it is, there are limits to the scientific method.  

I'm reminded of the cartoon titled "One Froggy Evening" in which the 
protagonist (Porky Pig?) finds a singing dancing frog.  Problem is, it 
will perform for him but not for anybody else.  If anybody else is around 
the frog just sits there, maybe giving an occasional croak, but never 
doing anything resembling singing or dancing.  So all our hero ever 
succeeds in doing is making people think he's crazy.  He finally gives up 
and gets rid of the frog, leaving it for somebody else to find.  

Although the makers of the cartoon probably didn't intend it as such, 
it's a demonstration of one of the limits of the scientific method:  If a 
phenomenon is intelligent and doesn't want to be found, then the 
scientific method won't find it, even if it's real.  

So if whatever deities there may be don't want scientists to find them 
(and are smart enough not to be outsmarted by the scientists), they won't 
be found.  And those gods may also be hiding the whole realm of what we 
might call paranormal phenomena.  We just can't know.  


                          *********************


                              Cotton Clouds


We don't want to make the gods sad, 
But for the sake of the green earth 
We need to give them headaches.  

Headaches?  Why would the gods need headaches?  

Once upon a time there was no such thing as rain, 
And the world was all dry and brown. 
But then one god got a headache
And took pills to relieve it.  

He threw the cotton from the pill bottle
Away into our sky
Where it became a rain cloud.  

With the rain came green growing things
But they didn't last. 
After a while they withered back to brown
Until the next time some god got a headache 
And threw his pill-bottle cotton
Into our sky to make more clouds.  

When the gods decided they needed to have headaches more often
To keep the world green 
They created humanity.  

Our job is to do strange quirky amusing things
To get them thinking and wondering and laughing so hard
That they get constant headaches
And have to keep tossing pill-bottle cotton
To make rain clouds to keep the world green.  

But we have to be careful. 
If we go beyond the strange and quirky 
Into the truly hurtful
Like wars and murderous cruelty and taking evil advantage of others
It makes the gods sad
And they won't want to watch our strange amusing antics
And won't get headaches
And won't throw away pill-bottle cotton 
And the world will again be all dry and brown.  


                                   -- Tom Digby
                                   First draft 17:30 04/15/2003
                                   Entered     13:34 04/18/2003
                                   Revised     13:54 04/30/2003
                                   Revised     02:12 05/01/2003


                          *********************

               HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU

If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is 

  ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net 

you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address 
will be posted.  That's the one you want if you like conversation.  
There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to 
almost nothing in between.  Any post can spark a new flurry at any time.  

If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're 
getting the BCC version.  That's the one for those who want just Silicon 
Soapware with no banter.  The zine content is the same for both.  

To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to  

 http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi

and select the ss_talk list.  Enter your email address in the space 
provided and hit Signup.  When you receive an email confirmation request 
go to the URL it will give you.  (If you're already on the list and want 
to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list 
posting you receive.) 

To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or 
bubbles@well.com).  I currently do that one manually.  


                                -- END --
  

    
                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #103
                        New Moon of May 30, 2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

Someone at a party showed an imitation Star Trek episode that some fans 
had made.  It was quite good for a fan-made amateur project.

It also reminded me of an idea I'd once had that might be good as an 
episode of some wacky comedy or something:  Someone loses a rental copy 
of a movie, and rather than pay for replacing it decides to re-create it 
themselves in hopes the rental company won't notice the difference.  

So they get their friends together in front of a camcorder, and act out 
what they remember of the movie as best they can, improvising sets and 
costumes and such as they go.  When they finally turn in the finished 
product the rental company doesn't really look at it, but just puts it on 
the shelf along with other copies of that same movie.  

The real fun comes when someone else rents it.  Will they be familiar 
enough with the original to realize that something isn't right?  If the 
original is something really bad, like "Plan Nine from Outer Space" it 
may not really matter.  

Or maybe this is one of those comedy worlds where that kind of thing 
happens all the time.  The climax could come when the original movie is 
shown at the local art theater, and they go to see it.  That's when they 
realize that the movie they'd rented and lost and re-created was itself 
somebody else's re-creation of a lost rental.  


                          *********************

Someone was talking about Programmable Gate Arrays, which are a type of 
electronics chip.  But I mis-heard it as "Programmable Gatorade"

That got me to wondering:  If there were such a thing as programmable 
Gatorade, what might it be?  

Might it be a sports drink spiked with nanobots?  Could you set it, 
perhaps by turning a dial on the bottle before you drink it, to favor 
some muscles or body systems at the expense of others?  This might be 
useful for tailoring it to a particular sport, such as track and field vs 
weight-lifting.  

Of course more nefarious uses come to mind, but hopefully there will be 
some kind of security to keep the chances of such misuse low.  


                          *********************

Am I still me?  

As far as I know I am, although if I had just now become me after having 
previously been someone else I would never know it if the memory swap 
upon becoming me had been good enough.  We tend to assume that we stay 
who we are, although that could be just an illusion.  Perhaps in reality 
we are constantly swapping identities, becoming somebody else every few 
days or hours or even minutes.   

Since there's no real way to know, all one can do is assume that one has 
always been whoever one seems to be at the moment.  


                          *********************

As you may know, a Bardic Circle is when a bunch of people sit around and 
take turns singing or reading poems or otherwise performing.  Sometimes 
the emphasis is on original work by the performer, but in some circles it 
can be anything a performer feels like doing, even if somebody else wrote 
it originally.  

So now I'm thinking of a Bardic Circle of the Gods.  A bunch of gods get 
together and take turns showing off worlds they've created.  They do this 
by temporarily putting aside knowledge of their godhood while living 
lives in each others' worlds.  Is that what this world is?  Is that what 
we are?  


                          *********************

Will digital technology, especially copy protection, cause the creative 
works of our age to be lost to posterity?  

For the most part we're no longer putting our words onto things like clay 
tablets that are likely to survive for centuries or even millennia after 
their creators are gone, and which can be read without special equipment 
by anybody who knows or can learn the language.  Instead we're trusting 
our thoughts and inspirations to digital media like CD's and DVD's.  

Not only are digital media less likely to withstand the ravages of time, 
but they require highly advanced technology to read.  And even if you 
have the technology, you won't get very far without knowledge of the 
digital coding system that was used.  Some error-correcting schemes, for 
example, make the bits look like random noise that make sense only if you 
know the code. 

Copy protection may be making the situation even worse.  While anybody 
with enough computer power may be able to take a brute-force approach to 
things like error-correction coding, trying various likely things almost 
at random until one produces something that looks like plausible data, 
some copy protection relies on encrypting the data.  The cryptographic 
keys are known to the makers of current generations of players, but 
they're kept more or less secret from the public.  So there's a good 
chance they'll be lost to posterity.  This may raise the difficulty of 
future archaeologists deciphering our digital media from "unlikely but 
possible" to "impossible".  

So umpty zillion years from now most of the 21st Century may be a blank 
chapter in the history books, alongside the likes of certain pre-
Christian religious mysteries whose practitioners did too good a job of 
keeping their cult secrets secret.  


                          *********************

What can be done to keep the art of our time from being lost to posterity 
because our descendants may not be able to read our digital media, 
especially the stuff that's copy-protected?  

Perhaps we need to start putting up pyramids full of some modern 
equivalent of clay tablets.  

I envision structures as massive and enduring as the Pyramids in Egypt, 
but containing art and literature instead of dead kings.  The material 
would be embodied in enduring analog media, or if there must be digital 
media, there would be instructions on how to read it.  These instructions 
would be in several languages, along with diagrams and pictures to aid in 
translation in case all of our current languages are lost.  

One thing I don't know what to do about is the grave-robber problem.  Can 
we get around it by creating enough duplicate sites that at least a few 
are likely to escape being looted?  Or do we just have to trust future 
ages to handle it?  Our present art and literature is, after all, their 
heritage.  Can we trust them to be good stewards of it?  


                          *********************

All this talk of preserving our art and literature for posterity leads to 
a question:  What kind of information density can you get with clay 
tablets? 

I was thinking about how computer floppies are much more ephemeral than 
clay tablets, which have been proven to remain readable after thousands 
of years.  But a typical ancient clay tablet holds at most a few 
kilobytes of data, compared to a megabyte or two on floppies and hundreds 
of megabytes on a CD.  The tablets were generally made by someone 
manually pressing a stylus into the clay, so the resolution was limited 
to what could be seen with the unaided eye and manipulated by hand.  That 
leads to a very low information density by modern standards.  

Can we improve the resolution?  Mass-produced CD's are, I believe, 
pressed from glass masters.  I suspect the glaze on porcelain might be 
capable of holding similar amounts of data.  The main problem would be 
chemical reactions that erode and roughen the surface, obscuring such 
fine detail.  Could this be gotten around by a transparent protective 
cover layer?  Even if that gets messed up, polishing the surface should 
allow the fine detail at the interface of the next layer down to be seen.  

But what if the finder doesn't know there's a message there?  There are 
ways to point it out.  Maybe start with a line of human-readable text, 
then gradually make the marks smaller and smaller until you're down to 
the size of the bulk of the information.  People are curious, so somebody 
will sooner or later put the tablet under a microscope to see how small 
the marks get.  The human-readable first line could also function like 
the human-readable label on a CD.  

Perhaps someone will want to set up a foundation to pursue this? 


                          *********************

As I was watching someone playing a didgeridoo I noticed a leaf hanging 
on spider webs or some such in the bell end.  When I mentioned it he said 
that there were spiders living in several of his instruments.  That 
inspired a couple of parodies of "Itsy-Bitsy Spider".  They were fun at 
the time, although probably not destined for poetic immortality.  

And now I'm wondering if the spiders would do better by moving to some 
other instrument.  A sousaphone, for example, could give an excellent 
opportunity to see the world from atop a marching band.  Or if the spider 
family wants a more sedate life, how about a church piano?  It would get 
played a lot on Sundays, and possibly for other classes and practice and 
such during the week, but it should be nice and quiet most nights after 
bedtime.  There's some danger of the children getting smushed between the 
hammers and the strings, but that's probably avoidable with proper 
parental supervision and boundaries on permissible play areas.  

I'd stay away from things like piccolos and kazoos:  In something that 
small a spider is too likely to be noticed, and few human musicians look 
kindly on the idea of spiders living in instruments they put their mouth 
on.  I don't know if the didgeridoo player was an exception, or if he had 
just sort of given up on getting rid of them short of using pesticides 
that may be worse in the long run than the spiders.  


                          *********************

An update on the thing I wrote up in SS 102 about squirrels and other 
small animals using telephone wires as walkways:  A few days ago I saw a 
couple of squirrels jump from one wire to another in mid-span.  So there 
may not be as big a need for animal traffic control as I thought there 
was, at least in places with multiple wires.  But what of places that 
only have one wire?  


                          *********************

                               Lost? Child

What did you say, son?
Why did I cut what?  Those flowers?
Because they were there.
We do need to clear this field before fire season.

But you say they weren't a fire hazard like the dry grass
So we didn't really have to cut them?
Maybe not, but it was easier to go cutting straight through
     than to stop and think about it.
If you really want flowers, you can buy flowers somewhere later.
Quit worrying about that kind of stuff.
Just forget all about it.  

Gateways for the Little People?
You say if you relax in a field of wildflowers
And let your eyes unfocus and your mind go blank
You may suddenly hear music and song and laughter,
And if you follow your ears and your heart
They'll lead you through the flowery gate 
Into the land of the Little People, 
Whose cares are different and perhaps more to your taste
Than the cares of this world?
I'd better not catch you telling that to the neighbors.
They'll think there's something strange about you.
Quit worrying about that kind of stuff.
Just forget all about it.  

We're almost half done.  Let's take a break.
Here's a tree we can sit under.

Son, do you hear somebody singing off behind me somewhere?
Are you going to meet them?
What are you laughing about?
Where did you disappear to?
Son?
Son? 
Answer me!
Wherever you are, come back here!
I am your father!

Please come back and tell me 
If I really did just hear a faint voice
Telling me
"Quit worrying about that kind of stuff.
Just forget all about it." 


                                        Thomas G. Digby
                                        entered  1215 hr  4/29/92



                          *********************

               HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU

If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is 

  ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net 

you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address 
will be posted.  That's the one you want if you like conversation.  
There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to 
almost nothing in between.  Any post can spark a new flurry at any time.  

If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're 
getting the BCC version.  That's the one for those who want just Silicon 
Soapware with no banter.  The zine content is the same for both.  

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                                -- END --
  

    
>  A few days ago I saw a
>  couple of squirrels jump from one wire to another in mid-span.  So there
>  may not be as big a need for animal traffic control as I thought there
>  was, at least in places with multiple wires.

LOL! I love how your mind works, bubbles.
  

    
                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #104
                        New Moon of June 29, 2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

Solstice was a week or so ago, and various people celebrated it with 
various rituals, some with mention of it being part of some "eternal 
cycle".  But is it really?  

In a sense it is, in that it repeats from year to year with little change 
over any one person's lifetime.  

But in another sense it isn't.  Scientists tell us that in the distant 
past the whole universe was nonexistent until it suddenly exploded into 
being, and at some distant time in the future the Sun will grow old and 
die.  And even if you don't take that long a view, many places have seen 
fairly major climate changes over the last few millennia.  

So while it's OK for most ordinary people to speak of the eternal cycle 
of the seasons, it's not really appropriate if you're a cosmologist or 
paleontologist or maybe even an archaeologist.  


                          *********************

My thought on waking the morning after Solstice was "It's all downhill 
from here."  Even if it wasn't noticeable yet, the season of light would 
be starting to wane, down to the nadir of darkness at the December 
Solstice.  I always feel a bit of melancholy at this time of year.  The 
first instance of it that I recall was at a childhood Fourth of July 
party, when it occurred to me that summer vacation was almost half over.  
In a few more weeks it would be August, and then it would be September 
and school would be starting again.  

I don't have school nowadays, but I do like the long daylight.  And the 
days of long daylight are slipping away, even as the weather continues to 
get hotter.  By Equinox the feeling will probably have passed its peak 
and be giving way to anticipation of the various festivities of the dark 
time of the year.  And then after the December Solstice the light will 
start to return, and the cycle will repeat.  


                          *********************

"He that has himself for a dentist has a fool for a patient."  


                          *********************

I had kind of a weird experience at the Laundromat a few weeks ago.  

I was leafing through a religious magazine that was sitting around, and 
someone who looked like he might be homeless asked me if I was a 
Jehovah's Witness.  I said no, and we got into a bit of a discussion of 
religion.  He went on about how he had been beaten up and stabbed and 
shot and hit in the face with a baseball bat, and how he suspected 
whatever God may exist had put us here to suffer.  

I didn't say anything, but I was amazed by how much violence had been a 
part of his life.  Does it come as a normal part of living on the 
streets, or did he tend to get into fights for other reasons?  It left me 
feeling thankful for my life as it has been, even with all its flaws.  

The conversation sort of wound down as he drank the wine he had just 
bought and his speech got more and more slurred and harder to understand.  
And eventually he left.  


                          *********************

At a recent party we got into a discussion about how right or wrong 
Einstein was about relativity and the impossibility of exceeding the 
speed of light.  The person who thought Einstein was totally wrong was 
also going on about how doubt is taboo in that field among scientists.  

At one point he brought up something I had often heard before:  When 
doubt about some scientific "truth" is taboo then progress in that field 
is pretty much blocked until the current generation of scientists dies 
off and is replaced by others with fresher viewpoints.  

I'd also heard something similar said of other fields, such as the arts.

That got me to wondering:  If progress in some field of science or art or 
philosophy really does now and then get blocked until some Old Guard dies 
off, what happens if medical science eventually gives us some kind of 
near-immortality, especially if the birth rate also goes down to keep the 
population from getting too big?

If it takes a lot longer for those in control to be replaced, what 
happens to fresh thought?  Do things stagnate?  


                          *********************

I have this mental image of a future when scientists develop effective 
immortality, and everybody still alive as of a certain date is more or 
less guaranteed, barring accidents, to live forever.  

Friends of one of the last people to die before the immortality thing 
becomes generally available are mourning his passing and thinking about 
how lucky they were to have lived long enough to become immortal.  

But that last person to die is happily sitting up in Heaven, looking down 
on Earth and being thankful that he got out just in time.  


                          *********************

Back in the early part of the 20th Century scientists didn't know what 
they think they know now about the history of our solar system.  

In one prevailing theory the planets formed on the fringes of a cloud of 
dust and gas and other debris as the cloud collapsed to eventually form 
the sun.  This meant that the outer planets would have formed first, 
before the inner ones.  It was also believed that the sun started out 
much hotter than it is now and gradually cooled to what it is today.  

What both of these theories have in common is that if any planets other 
than Earth were ever habitable, the outer planets would have became 
habitable before the inner ones.  Thus life on Mars would be older than 
life on Earth, which would in turn be older than life on Venus.  

Many people also believed in some kind of orderly "ladder of evolution" 
from primeval slime through trilobites and dinosaurs to humans.  

This was all reflected in the science fiction of the time.  Thus you had 
tales of ancient civilizations on Mars and dinosaurs on Venus.  

This was before the current theory of the dinosaur-killing meteor crash 
took over.  And nowadays I don't think anyone much believes in an orderly 
"ladder" of evolution.  It was also before they knew how much of a 
greenhouse Venus's atmosphere was.  In addition, our understanding of how 
stars form and evolved has changed considerably.  So ancient Martians and 
Venusian dinosaurs are pretty much absent from contemporary science 
fiction.  

So what other previously dominant scientific theories that have since 
fallen out of favor are reflected in the science fiction of the past?


                          *********************

In a discussion about brainstorming on The WELL (http://www.well.com/ (or 
telnet to well.com and log in as "newuser" if you're comfortable with 
Unix)) someone said something about posting silly ideas like "making 
shoes out of bubble gum".  That eventually triggered some serious 
thought:  A shoe made out of bubble gum would stick to the floor, so 
you'd have to coat it with talcum powder or something.  But it still 
wouldn't hold its shape, so you'd probably need some kind of semi-rigid 
outer covering.  

That led to thoughts of boots filled with something the consistency of 
bubble gum so that even if the boot is a bit large it wouldn't wobble 
around on the foot, and the stuff could act as a lubricant so you 
wouldn't rub the skin and get blisters.  

Since this would be messy to put on and take off, it would probably be 
used mostly in cases where the boots would be worn continuously for long 
periods of time, such as on space missions or in the military.  

If it's to be worn for days or weeks at a time, it should probably 
include anti-fungal and anti-bacterial agents to prevent some of the foot 
problems soldiers have had in the past.  It could also be formulated to 
absorb and/or reduce perspiration.  

And it might well end up being more comfortable than socks, once you got 
used to it.  


                          *********************

Some people are saying that movies are setting a bad example for our 
youth by showing people smoking, and that they should not be doing this.  

But it may depend on the time and place the movie is set in.  More people 
smoked in the Fifties and Sixties than do now, at least in the US.  And 
smoking was pretty much accepted in most social settings.  So a movie set 
around then would not be true to life if it didn't show people smoking.  

On the other hand, most people go to the bathroom several times a day but 
many movies don't show people going to the bathroom at all.  So if movies 
can gloss over people going to the bathroom, why can't they also gloss 
over people smoking?  


                          *********************

I have one of those digital thermometers that shows the Fahrenheit 
temperature, inside and outside, to a tenth of a degree.  During much of 
this past week it looked a lot like a listing of FM radio stations:  
89.1, 93.7, 100.1 ..."  

Even late at night, when things usually cool down quite a bit around 
here, it was still in the 70's outside.  That reminded me of this issue's 
poem, even though, strictly speaking, the weather condition known as 
"Santa Ana winds" (aka "Santana winds") is a Southern California thing.  
Similar winds do occur elsewhere, but under different names.  


                          *********************


                                Santa Ana

Warm winds make the night itself seem restless.
The trees toss and turn as they cannot get to sleep:
They wish they had the freedom to go running through the night
Like the leaves they often lose
To a wanderlust
That they
Can only dream of.  

Warm winds make the night itself seem restless.
A whispered invitation not to try to sleep:
To let the wind caress me running naked through the night
Like the gentle touch of lovers,
Lovers past
Or yet-to-be
I often dream of.


                                        Thomas G. Digby
                                        written 0340 hr  5/29/78
                                        typed   0505 hr  9/16/79
                                        entered 1245 hr  4/09/92


                          *********************

               HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU

If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is 

  ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net 

you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address 
will be posted.  That's the one you want if you like conversation.  
There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to 
almost nothing in between.  Any post can spark a new flurry at any time.  

If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're 
getting the BCC version.  That's the one for those who want just Silicon 
Soapware with no banter.  The zine content is the same for both.  

To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to  

 http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi

and select the ss_talk list.  Enter your email address in the space 
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                                -- END --
  

    
                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #105
                        New Moon of July 28, 2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

By law, the State of California is supposed to have its yearly budget 
approved before each new fiscal year begins on July 1.  However, it is 
not unusual for this deadline to be missed, and this is one of those 
years.  Although they may have a budget by the time you read this, as of 
this writing they're almost a month late.  I believe the record for 
lateness of the budget is about two months. 

Although they're likely to come to terms within another few days, the 
science fiction speculator in me wonders what would happen if they're 
never able to agree.  What would it be like after something like twenty 
or fifty or a hundred years of not being able to pass a budget?  

If the present members of the state government are all long dead but 
there's been no money budgeted for poll workers and ballots and such to 
elect their successors, who makes the rules?  With no money to pay 
judges' salaries, who settles disagreements?  If localities can still 
pass local budgets, would California become a bunch of semi-independent 
city-states, answering only to the Feds?  

Would one of the states or countries bordering California (Oregon, 
Nevada, Arizona, Mexico) try to move in and take over?  Or are the Feds 
likely to step in before things get that far?  

Or is that degree of decline unlikely to happen because the last couple 
of surviving legislators are too likely to be from the same party and 
thus will finally agree on a budget, assuming some successor to the 
governor is still alive to sign it?  

Has any science fiction writer written anything along these lines?  Even 
if it can't happen in the real world, it might be good material for some 
kind of comedy.  


                          *********************

Another thought on the no-budget scenario:  What if it's a world where 
magic works, and the budget impasse is due to some kind of spell cast by 
an evil wizard?  Then the hero has to find and vanquish the wizard in 
order to restore order before the kingdom falls apart completely.  

This might be especially good in a world where magic works but only 
magic-users are aware of it.  Could this happen in the California of 
Harry Potter's world?  Since the main Harry Potter action is in Britain, 
it's possible that something like this could be starting to happen in 
California but that the news hasn't made a big splash in Britain yet.  
That may be why we haven't seen it mentioned in any of the Harry Potter 
books so far.  Perhaps it will show up in the future?  


                          *********************

According to the thermometer and the radio, it looks like it's going to 
be one of those summer days when the song "Sunny Side of the Street" does 
not sound all that attractive. 


                          *********************

I saw something rather unusual a couple of weeks ago.  

I was on my way to a movie, and was turning left from Mary St. onto 
Central Expressway, which is one of those quasi-freeways where traffic 
moves at near-freeway speeds between the occasional traffic lights.  Just 
as I was completing the turn the pickup in front of me slowed to a stop.  
Then I saw the reason:  A mother duck was leading her ducklings across 
the road.  Once they reached the curb traffic proceeded.  

I found that interesting for two reasons:  First, that I was at the right 
place at the right time to see it at all, and second that the vehicle in 
front of me stopped for the ducks instead of just running over them.  
Come to think of it, cars in other lanes must have also stopped, or the 
ducks wouldn't have gotten that far.  Were they already stopped for the 
traffic light?  

Was the mother duck just lucky in that the light happened to be with her 
on her crossing, or was she smart enough to wait for the light before 
starting across?  

It may also be worth noting that nobody exhibited any sign of road rage 
as far as I could tell.  Was that because there were cute baby ducks 
involved?  Or is it that politeness is really the norm, with road rage 
being the occasional headline-grabbing exception?  


                          *********************

Q:  Shouldn't that ad for "double pain windows" read "double pane 
windows"?  

A:  No, "double pain" is correct.  The glass is impregnated with a 
chemical that blocks endorphins, so if you cut yourself on a broken piece 
it will hurt at least twice as much as with other broken glass.  It's an 
anti-burglar and anti-vandalism thing.  

Q:  So is that why the picture only shows one layer of glass?  

A:  Yes.  


                          *********************

There's an idea I've had off and on over the years for reforming welfare 
while also aiding students and artists and writers and the like:  Paying 
people to attend what amounts to Study Hall.  

You have an area like the reading room of a large public library, with 
plenty of books and magazines to read, along with comfortable chairs and 
tables.  You may also have a semi-separate area with computers on which 
people can type up and print documents without disturbing others.  For 
parents there could be designated areas in which children are welcome, 
leaving other areas child-free and quiet.  

And you have a time clock at the door.  When someone enters, they clock 
in.  They are allowed to stay as long as they like (until closing time) 
as long as they don't damage anything or cause a disturbance.  They can 
read, write, type on the computers and save their stuff to CD or floppy, 
knit, sew, draw, paint, or do any of a number of other things as long as 
they do it quietly and don't make a mess.  Then when they leave they 
clock out and get paid minimum wage for the time they were inside.  

There would be few, if any, questions asked about other income.  I 
suspect few wealthy people would want to spend their time there, so it's 
sort of self-policing in that regard.  If that turns out not to be the 
case then people's ID info can be collected at the door and the money 
they earn while inside taxed along with their other income.  Since the 
IRS already has the bureaucracy set up for this, there's no sense 
duplicating it.  

How would this help students?  They could come in and get paid to do 
their homework.  Likewise, artists and writers could get paid for time 
they spend creating their pictures and stories and such.  

It would also help improve working conditions for the working poor, since 
employers would be competing against the study hall for employees.  This 
might even eliminate the need for explicit minimum-wage laws.  

You wouldn't need to build a whole bunch of new buildings to implement 
this.  Just use the existing public libraries, at least in the pilot-
program stages.  People could still go to the library to read or to check 
books in and out, with the only difference being that they would earn 
some small amount of money while doing it.  

There would still be those who could not attend paid study halls because 
of physical disability or other reasons, but other parts of the existing 
welfare system could take care of them, much as is done now.  

Since this is a new way of doing things, it's bound to have problems.  
But let's try to approach them in the engineer's spirit of "How can we 
work around this problem to achieve the goal?" rather than the naysayer's 
spirit of "This can't be done because of Problem X."


                          *********************

Another thing in the news lately is the system for emailing comments to 
the White House.  Their whitehouse.gov Web site has a complicated set of 
forms where you enter personal ID info, check boxes for whether you are 
agreeing or disagreeing with existing policy, select from a menu of pre-
defined categories and sub-categories, and finally get to type your 
comments into a dialog box.  Some commentators have suggested that it may 
be deliberately designed to discourage emails.  

On further thought, I suspect it's designed to make the process of 
writing to the President less like letter-writing and more like voting.  

Few letter writers have anything truly original to say, and the staff 
doesn't really need to read "I agree with X" or "I don't like Y" over and 
over again.  All they really need to do is count up how many people are 
For or Against whatever the issue is.  Maybe they spot-check to see how 
many people are trying to say things the staff hadn't anticipated, but 
they don't need to read every single email that comes in.  

So what does this mean to someone with an original idea?  It means that 
you should not try to send it directly to someone like the President.  

Instead, try to get your idea into the public consciousness in other 
ways.  Tell your friends about it, and suggest that they tell their 
friends.  Write letters to the editor of your local paper.  Mention it to 
whatever local politicians you are in touch with.  If you're a writer, 
work it into your stories.  If you have a personal Web site, put 
something about it there.  And so on.  If the idea has merit, the people 
in power will hear about it sooner or later without your having to 
contact them directly.  

Then when the White House staff has heard enough about it to consider it 
worth asking about on their Web site, you and your friends can log on and 
"vote" for it. 


                          *********************

 ... and now for something completely different:  


                              Meter Madness


One morning recently on the way to work
I encountered a crew
cutting little holes in the sidewalk
and planting
parking meters.  

That brought back memories from high school days 
of a summer job on the parking meter farm
tending cuttings while they took root
and grew to the proper size
for the streets.

Cuttings?
Yes, you could grow them from seed
but they might not breed true.
They pick up pollen from wild strains
or even now and then mutate
to offer sixty-two thousand years for a quarter
or else maybe fourteen point three nanoseconds
for some coin not yet invented.
With cuttings you know what you're getting
and besides, most varieties are seedless
to allow no chance for a half-forgotten meter
on some deserted side street
to go to seed,
scattering to the wind
to sprout in the most awkward places.

Few things can match the fury
of some quiet suburban homeowner
finding his lawn infested
with parking meters,
not to mention the possibilities of interbreeding
with fire hydrants,
street lights,
and newspaper vending machines.  

So now they use the seedless types
and give them anti-growth hormones 
so they won't get too tall
and the roots won't invade the sewers.
Like, how would you like
to get up in the night for a call of nature
only to find, emerging straight and proud 
from the toilet bowl:
"TIME EXPIRED"?  
I hear it used to happen
and that's how they got the idea
for the pay toilet.

But that's another story,
along with the rumors that they're working on new breeds
for the indoor potted-plant market 
to replace African violets 
and cacti
and catnip
and even hanging plants
(by crossing them with Salvador Dali's watches).  
That sounds kind of interesting,
as long as no one comes around
to give out tickets. 


                                        Thomas G. Digby
                                        written 0440 hr  1/29/79
                                        typed   0345 hr  3/25/79
                                        entered 2325 hr  3/16/92


                          *********************

               HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU

If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is 

  ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net 

you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address 
will be posted.  That's the one you want if you like conversation.  
There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to 
almost nothing in between.  Any post can spark a new flurry at any time.  

If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're 
getting the BCC version.  That's the one for those who want just Silicon 
Soapware with no banter.  The zine content is the same for both.  

To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to  

 http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi

and select the ss_talk list.  Enter your email address in the space 
provided and hit Signup.  When you receive an email confirmation request 
go to the URL it will give you.  (If you're already on the list and want 
to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list 
posting you receive.) 

To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or 
bubbles@well.com).  I currently do that one manually.  


                                -- END --
  

    
These are great.
  

    
Expect another back issue to be posted every couple of days through issue
#111, by which time issue #112 should be coming out.  Then after this
topic has caught up with the actual zine there should be one new issue
every New Moon, give or take a day or so.
  

    
                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #106
                       New Moon of August 27,2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

The way gasoline prices have been going lately, I wonder if people will 
start wearing little vials or ampules of it as jewelry.  After all, it 
feels like it's getting up there with semi-precious stones, even if 
actual math calculations show otherwise.  


                          *********************

A dream a few nights back got me to thinking.  

In the dream, one of the neighborhood "regulars" was not very smart, but 
people loved him anyway.  His needs were somehow taken care of, perhaps 
with money from odd jobs and such, supplemented by occasional gifts.  
People were very kind to him, and he was always very happy.  

I don't think he knew about his condition.  Sometimes he would attempt 
something complex with computers or the like, and the people around him 
would arrange things so he didn't know the attempt had failed.  That kept 
him from being unhappy.  He never knew what he was missing.  

As I awoke from that I got to wondering to what degree, if any, intellect 
is required for a being to have emotions.  If "I think, therefore I am" 
has any truth to it, how much thought does a being have to be capable of 
thinking in order to be?  

A related question that drifted past with no real answer was whether 
there can be such a thing as pure happiness without awareness of what one 
is happy about.   

That in turn reminded me of a dream I had a long time ago about something 
called a "Concerner".  It was a plain gray box about the size of a small 
pizza box, maybe thicker.  

It used some of the same technology as artificial intelligence, except 
that instead of artificial intelligence it was artificial emotion.  If 
you owned one, it cared about you.  It wished for you to be happy.  
That's all it did.  It just sort of sat there being concerned.  

In the dream they were being mass-produced commercially.  I don't recall 
anything about how well they were or weren't selling.  

Once we develop the necessary Artificial Emotion technology might this 
become a computer-age equivalent of the Pet Rock?  


                          *********************

Thoughts of the Concerner also lead me to wonder about the ethics of it 
all.  For example, would it be unethical for a sadist to build an 
Artificial Emotion thing that did nothing but sit around feeling sad?  


                          *********************

At the Plergbistani Ministry of Information

Jr. Tech:  Ever since this router broke down and started losing data 
packets, traffic through this node has actually increased, despite the 
reduced capacity.  Any idea why? 

Sr. Tech:  You must be new to the Plergbistani way of doing things.  We 
believe in cooperating with those in authority.  Thus our version of the 
Internet sees damage as censorship and funnels traffic through it.  


                          *********************

Here's another recent dream:  

I think it started with me working on my car in the middle of a busy 
street.  There was some construction or something blocking traffic in 
that lane, so nobody really seemed to mind my working on my car there.  

But then I walked home to get some parts, and while I was gone the 
construction crew finished up and now my car was sitting there blocking a 
lane of an otherwise clear street.  So they towed it.   

So I walked down to the tow yard to get the car back.  Somewhere along 
the way I met a former co-worker.  I explained to him that I was 
converting my car (a 1993 Geo Metro in waking life) so that I could drive 
it on Mars as well as on Earth (the question of how I was going to get my 
car to Mars never came up). 

The co-worker said that the DMV had lots of rules for me to follow, 
including a speed limit of 24 mph on hills.  When I asked about major 
roads where traffic was moving a lot faster than that, he said that maybe 
I would be allowed to go 38 mph there.  I think this applied on Earth as 
well as Mars, although he thought the reason for the lower limit was the 
danger of losing tire traction in the lower gravity of Mars.  

Apparently he was my go-between to the DMV for such things.  Anyway, he 
said that the DMV had compiled a report on the subject.  I asked if he 
had a copy he could give me and he ran over the hill to his house and 
brought one back.  It was 8 1/2 by 11, spiral bound with light gray 
cardboard covers, and about an inch thick.  

I started looking through it.  I don't recall any details, but it was 
clear that somebody who liked science fiction had quite a bit of fun 
putting it together.  

Somehow some of the problems with Spring Break in Florida were relevant, 
and there was a section by the authorities there on things like handling 
crowds of onlookers.  And there was something about driving on Mars being 
similar to driving underwater on Earth, and that section had a map of the 
undersea terrain around the southeastern US.  I think it also got into 
sharks being an endangered species and mapped some of their habitat areas 
that Martian drivers shouldn't disturb.  Or something like that.  There 
was a certain amount of dream logic in some of this.  

I looked at northern Florida on the map to see if they included my old 
home town of Fernandina, but that area was a jumble of symbols for all 
sorts of things, with no room for city names. 

And along about there is when I woke up.  


                          *********************

In mundane news, part of Microsoft's response to the latest email virus 
has been to say that future versions of Windows may come with automatic 
downloading of updates turned on by default.  That way most people's 
machines will get all the latest security fixes without the user having 
to do anything.  

But I'm wondering how secure that arrangement is.  What if an attacker 
somehow manages to infiltrate Microsoft or otherwise get control of the 
Microsoft update site?  Or what if they subvert the part of the Internet 
that's sort of equivalent to the phone system's 411 and send users to the 
attacker's machines instead of Microsoft's? 

Might there be a science fiction story or two there?  


                          *********************

A couple of weeks ago I went to a big engineering trade show called 
"Wescon" at the convention center in SF.  

The show itself was somewhat disappointing, perhaps because of the 
economy or perhaps because the Web may be taking over some of the 
function of that type of trade show or perhaps because my interests have 
changed, but the trip was good nonetheless.  

On the way there and back I got to do some exploring around downtown SF 
and I got to blow soap bubbles in a park with lots of people around.

And while I was at the show I got to try out one of those Segway scooter 
things. 

The Segway wasn't quite what I expected, but wasn't all that big a 
surprise either once I thought about it a bit.  

You control your forward or backward motion by leaning, and it felt like 
I couldn't quite trust myself to lean backward to back up, or maybe 
couldn't quite trust the Segway not to let me fall backward.  Forward was 
less of a problem, but I could still feel myself not trusting myself or 
the machine.  Turns (controlled by a twist thingie on the left handlebar) 
were easier to get used to.  

Not being fully trusting while moving backward may be just as well 
because of the difficulty of seeing where I'm going.  As far as moving 
forward is concerned, the person running the demo says it typically takes 
a day or two to get used to it.  

I don't plan to buy one, although the thought did cross my mind as I was 
playing around on it.  Their Web site quotes a price around $5000, 
although I sort of expect that to come down with increased sales and 
production volume if it catches on.  

Now I'm wondering how useful this thing really is.  I could see riding it 
to some of the places I go to regularly that are up to a few miles away, 
but not much farther than that unless I can take it on the bus or 
something.  I suspect it's like a bicycle in that respect, with the main 
difference being that riding a bicycle takes different skills and 
involves more exercise.  So it may be possible for some people who can't 
ride a bike to use a Segway instead, but the Segway wouldn't give the 
health benefits of the exercise you get on a bicycle.  

I don't know about the environmental aspects.  I suspect that the impact 
of manufacturing one may not be all that different from that of 
manufacturing a bicycle, although it's probably more rather than less 
because of the electronics and the batteries.  And since it does run on 
batteries, there's a slight increase in the electric utility load from 
recharging them.  Figure maybe a bicycle plus a boom box for the 
environmental impact?  

So would large-scale use of the Segway be good for society?  To the 
extent it gets people out of cars, I would guess Yes.  But to the extent 
it gets people off of bicycles or out of walking shoes I would guess No.  
I suspect it will do some of both, although I have no idea which will 
predominate.  


                          *********************

They're putting up a fence around that new private school that's taking 
over the former Senior Center a couple of blocks from here.  That's not 
really surprising, although it didn't occur to me to think about it 
before they started setting the posts.  

The schools I went to as a child didn't have any fences around them.  But 
then that was a different place and time, a small town half a century 
ago.  Are small-town schools still unfenced, or have the fears and evils 
of the world caught up with them as with the big-city schools?  

Is this another reason to mourn lost childhood innocence? 


                          *********************

This next item is a bit out of season, but I thought I should include it 
anyway because a scientific study of this magnitude will need several 
months of lead time.  In fact it may already be too late for Christmas of 
2003 and we should probably be making plans for 2004.  

What is this project I'm proposing?  Collecting and analyzing DNA from no 
less a personage than Santa Claus.  

First some background:  

At a party last night (August 27, 2003) the conversation somehow got onto 
people leaving food and drink out for elves and such, whereupon somebody 
mentioned the custom of leaving treats out for Santa on Christmas Eve.  

That reminded me that when I was little we would set out an apple and a 
glass of milk for Santa.  On Christmas morning we would find the empty 
glass along with the apple core and a thank-you note, along with whatever 
toys and other gifts Santa would have left for us.  

It didn't occur to me back then because the relevant technology didn't 
exist, but last night I realized that the apple core and the glass might 
well contain some of Santa's DNA in cast-off cells in his saliva.  

My proposal is that children all over the world who normally set out 
treats for Santa be asked to turn the leftovers in for analysis, along 
with reference samples from their parents and other household members who 
might have acted as Santa's Helpers.  

I expect that many of the samples from the food and drink will match 
someone in the household.  These "Santa's Helper" samples would be 
excluded from further study.  Then the samples that didn't match a 
"Helper" would all be checked against each other.  If all goes well, 
many, if not all, should match each other.  This would be a fairly firm 
indication that we do indeed have Santa's DNA.  

There are rumors that Santa helps the Easter Bunny deliver baskets of 
eggs and such on Easter, in exchange for the Easter Bunny helping Santa 
deliver Christmas goodies.  If that's the case, the non-Helper DNA should 
match up into two groups, with one being consistent with rabbit DNA.  

Likewise, if Father Frost or other legendary gift-distributors are 
distinct from St. Nicholas, we should see it in our DNA samples.  

It's possible that the project won't find anything.  Since Santa is 
reputed to be a fairly powerful magic user, he may be able to make his 
DNA vanish or rearrange itself to match one of a child's parents.  But 
that would only prove that Santa is too smart for us.  

In any case this may be the first step toward answering many age-old 
questions about Santa Claus and Christmas.  

As I said earlier, I know it's a bit early to be talking about Christmas, 
but a project of this magnitude needs several months' lead time.  In 
fact, it may already be too late to do much for Christmas of 2003, 
although a small pilot project might still be possible.  But if we work 
at it, we might be able to have the required network of DNA collection 
and analysis sites in place for Christmas of 2004.  And by then the 
technology will have advanced another year's worth, so we'll be able to 
do even more next year than we could have done this year.  


                          *********************


                           Will You Write Me?


I can't see them or hear them or smell them, 
But I know they're there:  
Unwritten poems, waiting for some poet to come and write them. 

There's one at the end of that row of trees, 
Leading my gaze off into vague infinities 
Of memories and daydreams.  

And there's another lying in the gutter with that old tennis ball, 
Perhaps reminiscing about better days and laughing children 
While mourning the glory that was not to be 
At Wimbledon.  

And there are always several up in the sky, 
Floating around with the birds
Or the clouds
Or the stars.  

They wait, unseen, unheard, 
Until the right poet approaches.  
Then one will leap into the writer's brain, 
Or maybe sneak in on foggy cat feet
And slowly make its presence known over time.  

I'm usually not the poet they want.  
But now and then I am honored
When one does choose me.  

                                        -- Tom Digby 
                                        First draft 22:11 08/07/2003
                                        Revised     14:30 08/09/2003
                                        Revised     17:52 08/14/2003


                          *********************

               HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU

If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is 

  ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net 

you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address 
will be posted.  That's the one you want if you like conversation.  
There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to 
almost nothing in between.  Any post can spark a new flurry at any time.  

If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're 
getting the BCC version.  That's the one for those who want just Silicon 
Soapware with no banter.  The zine content is the same for both.  

To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to  

 http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi

and select the ss_talk list.  Enter your email address in the space 
provided and hit Signup.  When you receive an email confirmation request 
go to the URL it will give you.  (If you're already on the list and want 
to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list 
posting you receive.) 

To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or 
bubbles@well.com).  I currently do that one manually.  


                                -- END --
  

    
                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #107
                     New Moon of September 25, 2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

This month marks forty years since I started my first job, at General 
Dynamics in Pomona.  I'd just graduated with my degree in Electrical 
Engineering, and was recruited by one of those recruiters who visit 
college campuses around graduation time.  The pay was around eight 
hundred dollars a month, which was good money back in 1963.  

I recall having a great Sense of Wonder about it all.  Here I was, 
thousands of miles from the home I grew up in, on the fringes of a major 
polyglot metropolis.  I had grown up in small-to-medium sized towns with 
a rather homogeneous WASP culture, so the climate here was quite 
different from what I was used to, both physically and culturally.  

That job lasted something like four or five months, at which point the 
contract my unit was working on got canceled and I got laid off.  Was 
this cancellation a result of Johnson becoming President, or was it just 
coincidence that I was laid off a couple of months after Kennedy died?  

In any case getting laid off may have been just as well, since the work 
was very boring.  It consisted basically of taking a sort of inventory of 
the load on each tiny part of a fairly large system, and passing the 
results on to another group that used it to calculate how reliable the 
system was likely to be.  It might have been a good way to learn one's 
way around the system, but it was still rather boring.  

In any event I was out of work for several months until I landed an 
engineering job on the design of the southern end of the State Water 
Project.  All those gates and valves and such along the canal needed 
lights and motors and other electrical stuff, so I was part of the 
Electrical Engineering section that did that.  We also did cost estimates 
and other preliminary design work for the pumping plants along that part 
of the system, along with the hydroelectric generating plants that 
recovered some of the pump energy as the water came down the destination 
side of the mountains it had to be pumped over.  The pumping plants and 
the generating plants were very similar, except for such things as the 
direction of water flow.  

That work was somewhat more interesting than the previous job, although 
it too had boring moments, especially toward the end as the work was 
winding down but they weren't ready to let people go yet.  

The pattern after that was similar, with various full-time jobs 
alternating with periods of unemployment.  The main difference was that 
the jobs were more interesting and were for smaller companies rather than 
large bureaucracies, and there was some part-time work-at-home stuff 
during the time between "regular" jobs, so I wasn't completely idle.  My 
longest stay at any one job was a few months short of fourteen years.  

Right now is another of those "between" times, and again I'm doing some 
work at home, this time writing computer programs.  Is there yet another 
full-time job in my future?  There's no way to know.  


                          *********************

The Fall Equinox was a few days ago, amid some of the hottest weather of 
the year.  That reminded me that a few months ago I was worried that a 
May Day celebration I was involved with would get rained on, because the 
latter part of April had been unusually cool and damp.  And I seem to 
recall it being cooler and wetter than usual around Summer Solstice as 
well.  Are the gods scrambling the days of the year around at random?  


                          *********************

Newcomer to Plergbistan:  What's with this bill I got in change?  It 
seems to be marked as "Minus three Plergbistani dollars".  

Old-timer:  It's a minus three dollar bill.  

Newcomer:  Huh?  

Old-timer:  Suppose I owe you four dollars, but I don't have any fours.  
So I might give you a seven and a minus three.  Seven minus three is 
four.  

Newcomer:  So what do I do with the minus three?  Nobody around here 
seems to want it.  

Old-timer:  You have to keep it for the time being.  Sooner or later 
someone will owe you money.  Then you can give it to them to satisfy 
three dollars' worth of the debt.  

Newcomer:  What if I slip it to a tourist who doesn't know the 
difference? 

Old-timer:  Don't do it!  That would be stealing.  Some apparent tourists 
are undercover cops, and the penalties for theft are quite severe.  
Likewise, you shouldn't throw it away where somebody might find it.  

Newcomer:  So what if I tear it up or burn it?  

Old-timer:  That would be counterfeiting!  That's even more serious than 
theft.  

Newcomer:  So does that explain that big organized-crime bust a couple of 
days ago where they caught that gang with a bunch of paper shredders and 
a pile of money-colored confetti?  

Old-timer:  Yes.  


                          *********************

There was an incident where some pro football player got into a fight 
with another and injured him severely enough to put him out of action for 
several weeks.  It was all over the news, to the extent that even I 
noticed it, even though I don't usually pay attention to sports stuff.  

There were quotes from coaches and managers about how they keep telling 
their players about the importance of not getting into fights with their 
teammates.  The way it was worded seemed to me to indicate that such 
fights aren't all that rare.  Does the kind of macho mentality that leads 
to success in pro football also tend to lead to personal fights?  

I'm also reminded that I now and then see items about this or that big-
name pro sports player getting arrested for assault or drunk driving or 
something similar.  And again I wonder if success in certain sports, 
especially football and basketball and maybe hockey, requires a sort of 
do-it-NOW mentality that doesn't "waste" time pondering the long-term 
consequences of actions.  

Has anybody actually studied this? 


                          *********************

The words "sex with a bass drum" just sort of popped into my head as I 
was waking up one morning.  It doesn't really make sense, but things like 
that do just sort of pop up sometimes.  But why a bass drum?  There's no 
obvious way to have sex with one, but then who would want to?  

A snare drum, perhaps?  Other musical instruments?  Who knows what kinds 
of perverted things bagpipes and theremins might get into.  And don't get 
me started on musical saws.  They're kind of on the fringe of the 
community anyway, so they're primed for outlaw stuff to begin with.  

Now a harp, being a symbol of Heaven and all, might be expected to stay 
on the straight and narrow.  But you never can really tell.  Some of them 
might surprise you.  

But of course we'll probably never really know, since they're all rather 
bashful about doing anything when humans are around.  


                          *********************

Questions abound.  Good answers are scarce.  Thus has it always been.  


                          *********************

Something I've thought about now and then is that when any living cell 
dies, it's the end of a billion-year lucky streak.  Cells reproduce by 
dividing, so in a sense both daughter cells are the same cell as the 
parent, and that cell is in turn the same cell as its parent, and so on, 
back to before the age of the trilobites.  

When you consider how few of the cells of any complex life form end up in 
seeds or as eggs or sperm, and how few of those seeds or eggs or sperm 
cells actually result in offspring that survive to maturity, and how many 
times a given cell has had to take that chance, you begin to realize how 
lucky that cell has been up to now.  

So here I am looking at this cell that had been alive since the days of 
primordial slime, and now it's dead.  Maybe it ended up as part of the 
food I'm eating, or maybe it's a cell in my body that had the bad luck to 
end up in a hair follicle where it was called upon to give its life to 
help form a strand of hair, or maybe it was just some germ that I 
massacred as part of disinfecting something.  In any case its ancestors 
had had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time to 
continue surviving, but now its luck has run out.  

I don't know if this has any bearing on the Meaning of Life, but part of 
me thinks it might.  


                          *********************

Now I'm wondering about entropy and heat death.  If you're willing to 
wait an infinite amount of time, does entropy still spell the final end 
of the universe (assuming the universe doesn't collapse first)?  Or will 
there eventually be some chance event that reverses entropy enough for 
another cycle to start?  

The example I recall seeing mentioned is that in theory it's possible for 
all the gas molecules in a room to all end up in one part of the room, 
leaving the rest of the room in vacuum, just by chance.  The chances of 
it happening are infinitesimal, but if you're willing to wait enough 
zillions of zillions of years it will eventually happen.  And then once 
it happens it will probably collapse into a state with all sorts of air 
currents eddying around the room, even if the air had been still before 
that.  

So I'm wondering if something like that can happen on a larger scale, 
with a "dead" universe eventually springing back into life again.  I 
suspect it can.  Perhaps it's already happened, but with nobody there to 
notice how long it took. 


                          *********************

                           Hard Act to Follow


Last week I arrived early at the poetry reading, 
And as the first poet got up to read 
I heard her mutter 
"That's a hard act to follow." 

That seemed odd, 
Because she didn't seem to be following anything at all. 

Later on I asked her.  


  "No, I wasn't following another poet.  
  But I wasn't following Nothing either.  
  I wasn't following Cosmic Emptiness,
  The wait for the birth of the universe. 

  I was following your day:
  The broken copier at the office, 
  The idiot who cut you off on the freeway,
  Whatever good or bad news had come in the day's mail.  
  And don't forget dinner and the trip here.  

  And it's not like following another poet,
  Because with another poet I can judge the mood
  And choose accordingly.  

  No, what I'm following is different for each of you,
  So there's no one thing I can do that will be right for all.  

  So that's why whoever goes first
  Has a hard act to follow."


                              Tom Digby
                              written  16:26 May 26, 1995


                          *********************

               HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU

If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is 

  ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net 

you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address 
will be posted.  That's the one you want if you like conversation.  
There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to 
almost nothing in between.  Any post can spark a new flurry at any time.  

If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're 
getting the BCC version.  That's the one for those who want just Silicon 
Soapware with no banter.  The zine content is the same for both.  

To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to  

 http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi

and select the ss_talk list.  Enter your email address in the space 
provided and hit Signup.  When you receive an email confirmation request 
go to the URL it will give you.  (If you're already on the list and want 
to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list 
posting you receive.) 

To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or 
bubbles@well.com).  I currently do that one manually.  


                                -- END --
  

    
                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #108
                      New Moon of October 25, 2003


Contents copyright 2003 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
"fair use".  In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with 
proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this 
notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the 
zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a 
substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I 
get a cut of the profits.  

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

I sometimes go out walking at various times of day, and I notice that 
early mornings seem to just sort of feel different from late afternoons, 
even when the sun is the same height above the horizon.  Why is this?  

Is it because mornings are generally relatively cool while afternoons are 
generally warmer?  On some warm winter days I've had late-morning walks 
that reminded me of summer evenings. 

Is it because mornings are generally damp with dew while afternoons are 
usually dry, at least around here?  If that's the case, might a sunny 
afternoon after a rain feel like morning?  I don't recall noticing that, 
but it could be that I just hadn't been paying attention on those days.  
For what it's worth, I do think I've had a couple of foggy afternoons 
feel sort of like mornings.  

Is it that my subconscious knows which way is east or west and notices 
that the sun is in a different place in the sky and shadows are pointing 
in a different direction?  A test for that would be to see how mornings 
and afternoons feel in some unfamiliar neighborhood.  Or does that part 
of me also notice that the sun is climbing and the day is getting 
brighter rather than darker?  

Or it is entirely a circadian-rhythm thing, so that mornings will feel 
different from afternoons no matter what my surroundings are because I've 
just come out of spending several hours sleeping in the dark?  

I'll just have to keep noticing my feelings about mornings and afternoons 
whenever I'm out walking. 


                          *********************

A few weeks ago some of us were watching a videotape of the movie 
"Chocolat".  When it got to a scene where a dog was eating some 
unspecified treat while the people in the area were blissing out on 
chocolate, someone commented on the fact that chocolate is toxic to dogs.  
Did the movie-makers not know that?  Or was the dog's treat something 
other than chocolate?  I don't think any of the characters in the movie 
mentioned it either way.  

Later I started wondering whether chocolate is also toxic to related 
species such as wolves.  And if it's toxic to wolves, is it also toxic to 
werewolves?  If so, is it less toxic when the werewolf is in human form?  

Could chocolate toxicity be used as a test of who is or is not a 
werewolf?  It might make an interesting subplot in a werewolf movie.  


                          *********************

The movie "Chocolat" is about a Witch who comes to a small French town 
and upsets the established Christian-morality applecart.  For Pagans it 
has a happy ending, although at least one Christian movie-reviewing Web 
site ( http://www.capalert.com/ ) takes a much dimmer view of it.  

Later I got to thinking about it from the standpoint of Pagan ethics.  
Giving various characters magical or semi-magical chocolate looks to me 
sort of like casting spells without the consent of the person the spell 
is being cast on.  Even if you take a more material-world view, she was 
in effect dosing people with chemicals (chocolate plus chili peppers and 
maybe other exotic stuff) without their fully informed consent.  The 
combo was claimed to "unlock hidden desires".  But what if someone 
doesn't want their hidden desires unlocked?  Should it be done anyway?

So even if you think the overall effect of her workings is good, she 
might be doing it by not-good means.  


                          *********************

Daylight Saving Time (known as "Summer Time" in some other countries) 
will be ending, at least in the US, about the time this issue comes out.  

That reminds me of an idea I had years ago of slicing the Earth in half 
along the Equator, inserting a giant Lazy Susan bearing, and rotating 
whichever hemisphere is going into Summer westward relative to the Winter 
one, back and forth every year.  No more fumbling around resetting 
clocks.  As your hemisphere moves westward for Summer, sunset will come 
later because of the change in longitude, while the time of sunrise will 
stay roughly constant, at least in middle latitudes.  So we can get the 
benefits of Daylight Saving (more evening light) without the hassles of 
upsetting everybody's schedule.  

I wrote this up at greater length back in Silicon Soapware #51, which is 
ar