SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/user/bubbles/ Issue #58 New Moon of October 9, 1999 Contents copyright 1999 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. If you don't want to read about the mechanics of this, skip down to the row of asterisks (****). If you're getting it via email and the headers show the originating site as "lists.best.com" you're getting the list version, and anything you send to DigbyZine@lists.best.com will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation (although so far traffic has been light). If there's no mention of "lists.best.com" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The content is the same for both. To get on or off the conversation-list version send email to DigbyZine-request@lists.best.com with the word "subscribe" (to get on the list) or "unsubscribe" (to get off) in the body, but nothing else (except maybe your signature if that's automatic). Then when you get a confirmation message edit the REJECT in the subject line to ACCEPT and send it back. To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I do that one manually. ********************* Octuber is National Potato Month. ********************* There was an article in one of the tabloids recently (Weekly World News, 10/12/99) about some KGB gadget (a so-called "Ultrasonic Personnel Elimination Device") that can kill people over the phone. You just put the gizmo up to the mouthpiece, push the button, and ZAP! Some kind of "high-decibel" sound comes out the other end and makes the victim's head explode. They had a picture of an exploded head from some movie to illustrate what it might look like. Local calls? Long distance? It's equally effective on either. No mention of whether it can leave lethal messages on answering machines or voice mail, or what happens to the audience if it's used on a radio call- in show. According to the story, the devices started appearing on the black market after the breakup of the USSR. So far it has been used in only a few scattered murders, but authorities fear eventual wholesale slaughter of telemarketers. Now from what I know from my years of working as an engineer designing tape recorders to interface to the phone system, such a thing won't work. I suppose you might be able to inflict some pain by blowing a police whistle right into the mouthpiece, especially on a local call within an older non-electronic exchange. If you tapped directly into someone's line where it goes into their house you might even be able to inflict hearing damage (Remember the safety fuss about wireless phones that used the earpiece as a ringer?). But such things as ultrasonics and super-loud signals wouldn't get through modern long-distance telephone circuitry. Most toll and long- distance calls are digitized nowadays, and the numbers for the signal level don't go that high. And other electronic stuff along the way has power and frequency response limitations that would rule out lethal signals. Again, the best you can do is with something like a police whistle, which tops out somewhere between annoying and slightly painful. That's the case in this world. Evidently there are other worlds to consider. We all know about Cartoon Physics, where (for example) people walk off cliffs and don't fall until they look down. Clearly there's also a world running on Tabloid Physics. It's closer to ours than the world of Cartoon Physics, but still some distance away, perhaps almost as far away from here as Faerie. In the world of Cartoon Physics, if you're talking on the phone and want to do something to the person at the other end, you might squirt seltzer water or shaving cream or some such into the mouthpiece so it goes through the line and comes out the other person's earpiece. Or you might even be able to reach through the phone and pull his beard or something. You can't do that in the world of Tabloid Physics, but apparently you can blow someone's head off over the phone with high-intensity ultrasonics. There are a number of other differences between these realms, but I think they boil down to a few basic laws: Killing people in the world of Tabloid Physics is easy. On the other hand, people in the world of Cartoon Physics almost never die, even though cemeteries and ghosts abound in both worlds. Tabloid Physics favors gore, while Cartoon Physics favors humor. What humor there is in the world of Tabloid Physics tends to be gory, macabre, or humiliating. What bodily injury occurs in the world of Cartoon Physics usually heals quickly. Both the Tabloid and Cartoon worlds differ from ours in that things seem to have a greater tendency to happen for a Reason according to some Grand Plan. The reasons tend to be different, favoring gory retribution or perhaps dark humor in one vs light-hearted humor in the other, but both worlds do seem more Planned than ours. Related to this, extremely improbable events or chains of events, such as you winning the lottery or getting stuck by lightning (or both on the same day), are much more frequent in both those worlds than in ours. Magic, if it exists at all in our world, is subtle. In fact, it may be a Rule of our world that magic can always be explained away. But magic in both other worlds is much stronger. Again there is the difference in emphasis, with Tabloid Magic seeming to consist mostly of jinxes and curses and prophecies of doom while Cartoon Magic can have more happy stuff happening (even though it too has its share of curses and poorly-thought-out wishes). But all in all both worlds are much more magical than ours. Clarke's Law says that a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic. That's the version for our world. In both other worlds, any technology the general populace doesn't understand the details of IS magic. That's why you can squirt people with seltzer water over the phone in one world and kill them over the phone with high-intensity ultrasonics in the other. I've just started to explore this. You can probably think of more ways in which the Tabloid and Cartoon worlds differ from ours and from each other. And you can probably think of other worlds besides our world, the Tabloid World, the Cartoon World, and Faerie. ********************* Would I like to live in either of those other worlds described above? I don't think I'd want the Tabloid world. They have too much gore and death and grief and mayhem. But I might do OK in the Cartoon world. There's lots of frustration sometimes, and a few specific characters like Wile E. Coyote seem to be permanently doomed, but overall most people seem to do reasonably well. And I could probably deal with the logic OK, once I got used to it. ********************* I recently bought a piece of electronic equipment, and packed in the box with it was a little bag of stuff labeled: DANGEROUS / DO NOT EAT / DESICCANT / SILICAGEL plus something in some Asian language I can't read. Now I've seen similar "DO NOT EAT" packets before, but they weren't marked "DANGEROUS". So now I'm wondering: If you were to eat the contents of that desiccant packet, how long would it take you to shrivel up like a raisin? My guess: In the Cartoon World: A few seconds, or maybe a minute or two. In the Tabloid World: A few hours. In our world: Never, but you might get the kinds of medical and dental problems you'd get from eating gravel. So why is the packet labeled "DANGEROUS"? Is the piece of equipment the packet came with also sold in the Cartoon world and/or the Tabloid world, or maybe elsewhere? If so, they evidently distribute separate versions of the documentation, because the manual seemed to have been written only for people in this world. ********************* Incident Along Fantasy Way 0125 hr 7/28/74 The Bubble There he stood on the corner, Eyes silently pleading for Escape. I handed him a small bottle of liquid From which he withdrew a plastic wand with a loop on the end And blew a bubble, Gazing at the window reflection all bubbles show, Indoors or out, In this kind of world. After a while he stepped over to where the window would have to be, Climbed through, And vanished. Thomas G. Digby written 0125 hr 7/28/74 entered 2130 hr 2/08/92 -- END --