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/~bubbles/ Issue #77 New Moon of April 23, 2001 Contents copyright 2001 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. ********************* What's the logic of this series of numbers: 7 8 5 5 3 4 4 6 9 7 8 8? They're the numbers of letters in the names of the months in English. For some reason month names are shorter in the spring and summer and longer in fall and winter. It's almost a smooth curve, with the main exceptions being that February and September are a couple of letters too long. Is this coincidence, or is there some logical reason behind it? Another bit of trivia: One and only one month has the same number of letters in its name as its position in the year. Probably coincidence again, although you never know. ********************* I read a science fiction story recently where the main character was a robot or android, human enough in outward appearance and programming to engage in sexual activity with humans, but with electronics and such inside. One feature: Hidden jacks through which he could play his visual and/or auditory memories out to external equipment. Related to that, I've seen notices where someone is holding sort-of- sexual events with a "No photography or sound recording" rule. And such rules are not limited to sex. For example, most convention art shows have rules against photography. So what happens when technology advances a little further and we start seeing robots or androids or cyborgs with the ability to play their visual memories out to video or computers? Will they be barred from events that do not allow photography? If they're legally people (which cyborgs are likely to be even if robots or androids are not), would barring them be considered illegal discrimination? You might consider requiring them to forget what they'd seen there, but that seems unfair because there's no similar requirement for humans. And even if that kind of rule were allowed, could you take their word for it? Or will it become a non-issue for another reason: It's getting easier and easier to fake photographs. Maybe it'll get to the point where if (for example) someone at work shows around a photo of you at a kinky sex orgy nobody will actually think about your sexual proclivities. Instead they'll be asking what version of what software it was done with. As for rules against photographing things like artwork that people want to keep intellectual property rights on, cameras are getting smaller and easier to hide. So such rules may become impractical for that reason also. ********************* Do countries ruled by religious fanatics with rules against "graven images" have pictures on their driver licenses and passports? ********************* Do barnacles on the bottoms of ships wish they had eyes so they could see all the exotic ports they go into and out of? The answer is probably No, because they don't have enough brains to even think about the concept of wishing for stuff. And no, they don't wish for enough brains to be able to wish for stuff either. That's a circle with no beginning: "I wish that I had enough brains to be able to wish that I had enough brains to be able to wish ...." Nope. And even if some deranged mage somehow gave them the wits to be able to wish, and incited them to wish for something or other, so what? They're not in a position to do much. I suppose discontented barnacles could be a source of psychic noise to annoy any other mages who happened to be nearby, but that's about It. ********************* The scene is a military briefing room in an alien installation on the far side of Earth's moon. An instructor is showing a gunlike object to a group of newly arrived officers. "As you can see, this appears to be a Klegnavarian third-order disrupter pistol. Note the row of three spherical resonators of decreasing diameters, and the beam stabilization ring at the exit from the final resonator. Such disrupters have been outlawed for civilian use on almost every civilized planet because their destructive power is well out of proportion to the needs of any reasonable hand weapon." "This, however, is not a real disrupter. It is a child's toy. You dip the ring into a soap solution and then when you pull the trigger a concealed blower blows the liquid into bubbles. [demonstrates] It's harmless, unless you poke somebody in the eye with it or something." "If you look closely you can tell it's not a real disrupter. First, it has only about a third the mass of a real one. And if you take a close look at the muzzle ring you can see that this one has a pattern of fine ridges to help it hold the soap solution. There are other differences as well, such as the lack of trigger guard or safety. [passes it around] It is important that you learn the differences, since there are believed to be more of these on this planet than there are real disrupters in the entire Federation." "We aren't sure how this happened. We once thought that one of the test subjects the Klegnavarians picked up was a designer of toys for mass production. Even though they cleared most of the episode from his mind when they released him, an image of the disrupter may have remained in his subconscious, to surface later." "However, there is some evidence that the toy came first. After Klegnavarian thought-suckers found the image of the toy in some of their victims' minds one of their engineers may have gotten the idea of staggering resonator frequencies on a first-order disrupter to increase the beam bandwidth and activate third-order effects. The toy could also have been the inspiration for the flux ring at the muzzle to suppress third-order beam instabilities." "Whichever theory is right, or even if the similarity is pure coincidence, the dangers of the situation are obvious. Someone down there could be waving around a real disrupter, and we would have no way of knowing the difference from a distance. And it would be simple to disguise a real disrupter to look like the toy. If you modified the control circuitry to run the cooling blower at low power without activating anything else you could even make a real disrupter blow bubbles. The only sure way to tell is by feel, since the real one is much more massive than the toy." "The seemingly obvious solution of having the local government issue a decree outlawing these toys is not available. The government of the region where these are most common is based on a constitution, and it has not given itself the authority to arbitrarily ban toys. It does have some authority to issue bans where safety is involved, and has taken some steps toward regulating other imitation weapons, but only where the weapon being imitated is one that's common on their planet. Since there has been no public announcement of contact with other planets they have no legal basis for regulating toys that imitate the appearance of off- planet weapons. And even if we were to succeed in getting them outlawed, there are so many of them out there that we would never be sure of having recovered them all. That government does not give itself authority to conduct periodic audits of people's belongings, so if some of these were languishing forgotten in storage we would never know until the owners or their heirs stumbled across them again." "The one bright side to this is that as far as we know no real disrupters have fallen into native hands. As long as we can maintain that situation you can be safe in assuming that anything you see on this planet that looks like a Klegnavarian third-order disrupter pistol is harmless." ********************* I have this idea for a cartoon: Devil on TV, giving the weather forecast for Hell: "Fair through Thursday, highs in the 70's, with increasing clouds and cooling temperatures Friday afternoon and evening. Blizzards Saturday and Sunday. Clearing Sunday night, just in time for most roads to be sort of passable for the Monday morning commute. Then fair again with highs in the 70's for the work week." ********************* Some news story claimed that studies back in the 1970's that showed medical benefits from marijuana were suppressed. That inspired this: What if we were contacted by humanoid space aliens with a strange property: Oral sex with a male alien (if you swallowed) would cure many diseases that Earth's medical science is still helpless against. Stored alien semen won't work, perhaps because of some psionic aspect of living sperm cells. Side effects, if any, are rare and/or mild. There seems to be little downside to this. Some say this is the work of God or the Christian devil, while many Pagans cite the Trickster. Others believe it's the product of advanced alien technology combined with a sick sense of humor. The aliens themselves claim not to know the origin of the effect. In any event, most of the aliens who come to Earth are happy to be of service. Most are about as physically attractive as the better-looking humans, if you discount details like green skin. So now come the ethical questions. If you have a condition that swallowing alien semen will cure, but your religion teaches that non-procreative sex is evil or that the aliens were sent by Satan or that it is a major no-no for some other reason, what should you do? Presumably you would resist the temptation to take the cure yourself, but what would you do with respect to others beyond advising them of your beliefs? Would you try to remove the temptation by persuading the government to banish the aliens? Would you try to suppress information about the cure, or maybe make up horror stories about side effects or pod people or the like? Would you try to make life on Earth as difficult as possible for the aliens in hopes that they won't like it here and will leave? Other? ********************* Now that the human genome has been sequenced, will racist groups start looking through people's DNA in search of genes that supposedly prove whatever point they're trying to make? Might be worth a science fiction story or something. The movie "GATTACA" comes to mind, although there the emphasis was on genetic engineering rather than racism. ********************* I often get ideas while in the shower. One day I was thinking about monorails. There's a song going through my head about how many of the writer's childhood science fiction dreams failed to come true. It has a line something like "The monorail that once ran to the spaceport Takes children for an outing in the park." That got me to wondering why. There seem to be two main types of monorails, which I'll call "low-rail" and "high-rail". A low-rail monorail has its rail at the bottom of the car, usually with the car appearing to straddle it. The Disneyland monorail is of the low-rail type. A high-rail monorail car hangs from an overhead rail. I don't know if any of this type have been built. When I think of a monorail I tend to think of urban transit, running above normal street level like an elevated train. I believe it was supposed to be cheaper to build elevated monorail than elevated conventional train track. The usual image of this is low-rail. High-rail could also be built as an elevated, but the supports would have to be taller because the rail is above the car. This might put it at a disadvantage in that type of service. It might, however, be good in tunnels where it could be hung from the roof. It might also be good for replacing trolley cars along streets where you can't run low-rail without that big rail blocking intersections. One problem with high-rail is that the car would have a tendency to swing like a pendulum. This might be good for going around curves at high speed, but could be disastrous if the car is swinging sideways when it's approaching a station platform. Low-rail cars have auxiliary wheels that run along the sides of the rail to stabilize them, but high-rail rails are generally smaller and less suited to that kind of thing. So there's more of an engineering problem there. Another problem with either type is that even urban transit isn't all elevated or all buried. It's some of each, along with a lot of surface track. So whatever advantage one type of monorail might have in one or the other environment is diluted by the variety of routes. If you include rural routes the mileage is overwhelmingly on the surface, not elevated or buried. That is where conventional rail probably has the cost advantage, or at least is not at a major disadvantage. And don't forget the head-start factor: Conventional rail has been the default, in both urban and rural service, for well over a century. It has something like 150 years of engineering and operating experience behind it. That alone gives it a big advantage over any type of monorail. So while I see some faint possibility of using monorail if you're building a brand-new city from scratch and don't want any track at grade, or if one of the main goals is to have a science-fiction feel, most real- world places will probably continue to use traditional train track. ********************* The weather has been warmer than usual the last few nights, and the days have been windy. Even though the Bay Area doesn't have true Santa Ana winds like Los Angeles, I'm reminded of this: 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 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. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, dying down to almost nothing in between. But any post can spark a new flurry. 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. 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