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 #99 New Moon of February 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. ********************* Dream: I was at work, and some of my co-workers were having a religious holiday where people didn't take the day off, but instead went about their work with special attention to their religion. People of other religions would generally cooperate with them in this. I can see value in that. It could be a good reminder to think about how things like ethics may have slipped in the workplace during the past year, and an inspiration to try to do better in the year ahead. The problem may be in distinguishing between broad ethical principles that many religions share and rules that different religions are more likely to disagree on, such as gender roles and who is allowed to have sex with whom. Can we renew the former in the workplace without also bringing in the latter? ********************* The dream had other details that weren't really relevant to the basic idea, but may be interesting in a dreamlike way: For example, there were special rules for that religion's equivalent of kosher food, a little like Passover but different. People were getting their special meals delivered to them by helicopter in their cars on the way to work, or dropped from planes flying over the plant, or by other means that seem normal in dreams even if they seem strange when you think about them while awake. At lunch time, people went out into the yard to eat. There were special places in the bushes where one could spit food morsels without fear of contaminating anything that should be kept clean. Other people were going through the building, marking places where children had chewed the woodwork, because that counted as the house having been eaten, which made it a food item, and special ritual purification was needed. There was also some provision allowing local authorities to make minor changes to the rules. One such local rule involved an engineering change to a circuit board we were making. I don't know what it was except that it was minor, but people were taking boards out of stock and making the change. Then came the end of the day, and the person in charge of the stock room was going around trying to gather up all the boards that people had just sort of informally picked up to modify without any written records. Being a manager of a factory in Dreamland looks "interesting" in the sense of the old Chinese curse about living in interesting times. ********************* And another dream, on a different night: I was working with some people who were doing up animation to run on some kind of touch-screen kiosk, and I was told to create a segment about "Christmas on Jupiter". I got a mental image of giant slug-like creatures decorating their cave with colored lights, and immediately had a question: Would the atmospheric pressure at which the supposed inhabitants of Jupiter lived allow incandescent light bulbs to exist? I tried asking around but nobody could or would answer my question. It felt more like I was being told "Everybody knows ..." than "You don't have to be consistent with anybody else," which I probably could have lived with. Then when I tried to get some background by viewing the stuff that was already on a prototype of the kiosk the interface was horrible. The kiosk would play a segment, and then a touch-screen menu would quickly scroll by, and then another segment would play. I suppose if you knew what was where on the menu so you didn't have to take time reading it you might be able to do something with it, but even then you would have to hit a moving target. I found it basically useless. As I was waking up I had other questions such as whether they celebrated Earth Christmas every December or Jupiter Christmas when the Sun was in Capricorn as seen from Jupiter, and whether Jesus had been born on Jupiter as well as on Earth, but the first question that had popped into my mind deep in the dream was whether Christmas lights were practical on Jupiter (and no, I didn't think to wonder whether they had electricity). ********************* Are we as a society over-protecting our children? This question came up at a party a few days back. Various adults spoke of how when they were kids they were allowed to walk to and from school alone at an age when most children nowadays, at least around here, are driven by their parents. Has the environment gotten more dangerous, or have parents become less willing to let their children take risks? One person theorized that parents are more risk-averse nowadays because children face fewer perils in other areas, such as disease. Having a child get seriously ill or die is much less common than it used to be, so that small hurts are more noticeable against this reduced background. Thus the minor injuries (along with the occasional not-so minor one like a broken bone) that our grandparents just sort of accepted as part of growing up are now seen as more of a big deal. Another big fear is crime. How much of the perceived increase in crime risk is real, and how much is just better data-gathering and more ubiquitous and sensationalistic news media? And if we are being more protective of our children than we used to be, what will be the long-term effects on society as those sheltered children grow to adulthood? ********************* "Let's patent invisible windshield wiper blades." "Huh?" "Sooner or later somebody is going to figure out how to make objects invisible. And once that happens, somebody else is going to think of applying it to windshield wipers so as to be less distracting to the driver. It'll be a zillion-dollar product, and we'll get a big chunk of the profits because we'll already have the patent on it." "But what if they don't invent that invisibility gizmo for another twenty or thirty years? By the time we can do anything with our patent on invisible windshield wipers it will have already expired." "So maybe we want to wait and not turn in our patent application for invisible windshield wiper blades until it looks like they're close to inventing some way to make them invisible. Then our patent won't have expired." "But isn't there some time limit on applying for a patent on something after you've invented it? I think we may have made a big mistake by thinking of the whole idea too soon." "I think the time limit is from when you tell people about it, not from when you first think of it. So if we don't blab until we're ready to apply for the patent, I think we'll be OK." "So does that mean we can't print it in this zine?" "I'm afraid so." "Oh, poo!" ********************* One interesting observation at a gathering of people who weren't sf fans but weren't really mainstream mundanes either: Someone brought a bunch of leftover Christmas candy, and had left piles of it on the tables. Since nobody seemed to be interested in it, and I had periods of nothing to do between conversations, I started building a little tower out of candy canes and pieces of chocolate (all of which were individually wrapped, so sanitation was no problem). A couple of people remarked that it looked interesting, and brought over more candy for me to use, but nobody accepted my invitation to participate in the actual construction. Had this been a group of science fiction fans I'm pretty sure several others would have joined in. So are science fiction fans somehow different from these people mentally, even though both groups are full of intelligent people with something of a countercultural outlook on life? And what would other groups have done? Would, for example, a group of artists have joined in because artists are more into creating things? How about a group of engineers? I may need more data points. ********************* One person at a poetry reading had a poem about a character who had too many problems and responsibilities, and ended his speech with "I wish I could just be a weed." Later he said he wasn't happy with that ending. I think it fits in a way, because plants don't have any problems that they have to consciously worry about solving. They just Are. Or, if somebody cuts them down or something, they just Aren't. Either way, they have no reason to worry about it. On the other hand, if you dislike situations where you aren't in control of your own destiny, then plant-hood is not for you. ********************* One interestingly silly idea came up among a bunch of us at a coffee house: Someone noticed a newspaper headline about genetic studies on worms, and commented on it to the group. One of the others heard "worm genes" as "worm jeans" and wondered why worms might want to wear clothing. I immediately thought of worms infesting the apple in Eden. Would they also get the modesty about their bodies that Adam and Eve got from eating the fruit? If so, then their descendants might be wearing clothing even to this day. Yes, I know the so-called "worms" in apples are usually some kind of insect larvae and not true worms, and the forbidden fruit in Eden may not have been an apple. But the image of an apple in Eden is deeply embedded in our culture, as is the word "worm" for whatever long thin crawly things infest apples. So let's stick with those words for a while. Would clothing on worms (or caterpillars or whatever) be an advantage or a disadvantage? A worm wearing clothing might be harder for an early bird to digest, so birds might come to avoid eating such creatures. That should be an advantage. But on the other hand, clothing might make it harder for worms to crawl around to get wherever they need to get to. And making clothing may take a lot of effort that the worms could otherwise devote to other tasks. So it could be a disadvantage. Since all the worms I've ever seen have been naked, I suspect that worms in general can survive better without clothing, and if there were indeed apple worms in Eden who thought they needed to wear clothing, their descendants are now extinct, or at least are so rare that nobody has yet found them. Or maybe not. If that fruit tree was unique, and God had just finished creating the various species, maybe he hadn't created anything that would infest that particular fruit. Something might evolve later to fill the gap, but by then fruit from the descendants of that tree might have lost its special powers. If that's the case then there may never have been worms trying to crawl around while wearing the wormish equivalent of fig leaves or loincloths or blue jeans or whatever, so we need not bother worrying about them. ********************* As I was out walking I noticed some interesting cloud patterns and was reminded of a science fiction story I read many years ago. That society had alternate-world travel and their Paratime Patrol (or whatever it was called) was sending agents hither and yon across the timelines on various missions. The point was made that no matter how far the agents went, no matter what exotic parallel world they visited, the sky never changed. The weather was always the same in all timelines, apparently because puny humans with their little wars and such weren't powerful enough to change even the shapes of the clouds. But today scientists believe that not to be the case. Even if they don't believe in alternate timelines, most scientists who have studied the weather believe that human activity does modify it. Even if the line about the butterfly in China causing or preventing a storm in California by how it does or doesn't flap its wings isn't literally true, they have documented other effects, such as increased rainfall downwind from sources of certain kinds of air pollution. So what conventional wisdom in the background of today's science fiction will be seen as wrong a few decades from now? ********************* Weather Music Nobody really CARED about the weather in Sector 47 Forty miles from nowhere In an obscure corner of the Empire But the Law was the Law So they had a Weather Control Station Anyway. Now the weather was supposed to be managed "For the benefit of the People" But since the only people in the Sector were the station crew They did pretty much as they pleased. For instance, They had friends who were musicians in the city And who would come in once or twice a month to visit And have jam sessions. I was at one once -- It started out fairly normal, Just people making music. But along toward midnight As things were building They joined in with the elements: At first with simple things like moaning wind For a song about the desert Or gentle steady rain For a ballad of aching loneliness. Then, to a pounding rock beat, the climax -- Hard driving rain, even a little hail, Howling feedback and screaming wind, Crashing chords mixed with thunder and lightning (With the thunder right on the beat) Giving way at last To silence And moonlight. Thomas G. Digby written 0315 hr 10/27/74 entered 2220 hr 4/12/92 ********************* 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 --