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 #112 New Moon of February 20, 2004 Contents copyright 2004 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. ********************* Something got me thinking about the dreams I've been having. Most are relatively prosaic, at least compared to dreams I've heard others describe, although many of them are at least a bit at odds with the way things are done in the waking world. In one I was a designing a municipal water system, and I was following the latest recommendations from the experts, specifying cast-iron pipe with wooden valves. These valves weren't in manholes or anything like that where you could get to them easily, but were just buried in the ground along with the rest of the pipe, so you would have to dig up the street to change the settings. Then as I was waking up I got to thinking of maybe twenty or thirty years down the road when the wood would be rotting and the system would be falling apart, and people would start asking me "You didn't fall for that bit about wooden valves, did you?" Although this does seem kind of strange compared to the way most water systems are designed, it's nothing compared to some of the things I've heard other people say they dream about. ********************* Somebody in an online discussion group I'm in posted a description of a malfunction in some kind of computerized speech device. He said that instead of the normal perky female voice it spoke in a low husky bedroom kind of voice, with the syllables long and drawn out. From the description it sounded to me like the speech samples were being played slower than normal, like a 45 RPM record being played at 33 1/3. Then I got to thinking. I'm familiar with the sound of a phonograph record being played at the wrong speed, as is almost anyone who grew up before CD's took over. I did my share of moving the little lever between "78" and "45" and "33" and even "16", taking some sort of childish pleasure in listening to how the voices and music changed. I also did similar things with reel-to-reel tape recorders at 7 1/2 or 3 3/4 or even 1 7/8 inches per second. But what of people born in the CD age? Yes, there is software that will let you make a recording and play it back at a different speed. But how many people other than musicians have played around with that? Is this another childhood experience that is fading from public consciousness as technology marches on? ********************* In another dream I was supposed to be turning into a bear. It was supposedly a normal stage in my existence. I had withdrawn from my former home and friends, presumably to take up life as a bear in the woods. But I didn't feel bear-like, and was hanging around some parked cars, perhaps thinking of sleeping in them, more like a homeless person than a bear. Then a woman I knew who was an expert in magical stuff came by. She looked a little different from what she looks like in the waking world, sort of lumpy or something, but I still recognized her. So I was telling her how I didn't feel like a bear, and she confirmed that by saying that I still looked "normal". So we went walking down the street, and whenever I passed something shiny I would look for my reflection. And I still didn't look bear-like, even though I may have been walking on all fours. Then some sort of monstrously huge bear came down out of the mountains, and I was supposed to challenge it, or maybe protect the human settlement from it, or something like that. It looked a bit like a large dog might in the waking world, or maybe like a cross between a dog and a bear, but in that world it was a bear. And it was large, larger than an elephant would be in our waking world. And it was growling, and I was going to challenge it. And then I woke up. So does this kind of dream mean anything? Or was it just mental "noise"? ********************* As a cop is writing a parking ticket for a car, the owner walks up. Owner: Why are you writing me a ticket? I don't see any signs restricting parking. Cop: There's a "NO PARKING WITHIN WALKING DISTANCE OF THIS SIGN" sign over on Ooleatrompt Street between Gloshnorth and Pisoulean. Owner: But that's at least two miles away. That doesn't sound like walking distance to me. Cop: It's 2.3 miles to be exact. You're in good shape so you could walk it easily if you really wanted to. Don't you walk at least that much every day for exercise? I've seen you out walking on Klooct Boulevard and Gleezlenorpt Lane. Owner: I suppose you're right. So are you going to ticket all these cars that are parked here this morning? Cop: No. These other guys are all lazy and out of shape. Maybe some of them could walk a mile if their lives depended on it, but just barely. So they're OK parking here. Owner: But how was I supposed to know that sign was there? I don't get over to that part of town very often. Cop: I don't make the rules, I just write tickets. ********************* In yet another dream I'm stuck at some fast-food place. I'd lost too much weight, and now they think I'm one of the performing fries from their commercials and they won't let me leave. At least I get free food, as long as it isn't fries. They think that performing fries eating regular fries is too much like being a cannibal. ********************* Some thoughts on that Peter Pan movie that came out a month or two ago: They didn't give an exact date, but it looked like the story was set sometime in the latter part of the 19th Century. One question that came up in my mind was whether something like that story could happen today. I hope I'm not giving away too much of the plot when I mention that at one point some children come back from Never-Never Land to live with various adults in our world. Apparently the adults were going to just sort of quietly take them in with few if any formalities. Nobody mentioned anything about needing to explain anything to the authorities about the sudden appearance of those children. Today there would be demands for birth certificates and immunization records and such, along with questions about why they weren't in any of the various databases that children get listed in nowadays. Or maybe they were listed, but had been missing for several years. Either way, the adults involved might find themselves in a rather uncomfortable position. Does that mean that the Peter Pan story couldn't happen today? Or does it just mean that Tinker Bell would need to go flying around all over the planet, throwing Magic Fairy Dust into computers to create a plausible history for the children? Does she know enough about computers to do that without causing massive crashes? Questions abound. Answers do not. ********************* And so the dreams go on, from being some kind of super-villain taunting the police, to going through the leftovers after a banquet in hopes of finding bones to use as clubs for defense in case we're attacked. Or maybe I'm building some kind of super laser setup that does something wonderful, except I'm not clear on what, if anything, that wonderful thing might be. Or I'm in some exotic tropical land, watching the natives build an earthen dam for a giant artificial lake as part of a project to build a new radio telescope. So what does all this mean? I've been told conflicting things by people who claim to know: Some are sure that dreams are messages from the spirit world, wile others are equally certain that they're just the brain's way of sweeping up the debris of old discarded thoughts. Is the real truth knowable? I suspect there may be no one "real truth" at all. ********************* I recently got an email that mentioned "swamp gas" and came with an attached parody news article about Martians reacting to our space probes. What's interesting (aside from the article, which is probably making the Internet email rounds) was that I initially misread "swamp gas" as "swap gas" and then got to wondering what such a thing might be or do. Would swap gas cause random items to swap places? Or would it work only on living things, perhaps causing them to swap identities? This latter leads to an area that's had zillions of fantasy and sf stories already, but you never know if something like this could spark a new twist on an old idea. ********************* Dreams often seem to take place in worlds much different from the one we inhabit while awake. That leads me to wonder if such worlds could actually exist. Scientists say that certain relatively small changes in the physical laws of our universe would make life as we know it impossible. Change this or that constant by a few percent and stars wouldn't shine brightly enough or last long enough for life to evolve, or atoms of elements we need for life wouldn't hold together, or something else in this incredibly complex system wouldn't work. But scientists can only talk with confidence about the things they know. What about life as we don't know it, in realms wildly different from this universe? For example, imagine an endless flat plane, peopled with beings that are not made of what we think of as "atoms". What are they made of? We can't say. Does their substance have some smallest possible unit analogous to our atoms even if they are structured differently, or can it be subdivided indefinitely while still maintaining its identity? Again, we can't really say. Neither can we say how the various substances in such a world might react with one another to be transformed into other substances that creatures in that world might be made of. And what of their heavens? Gravity as we know it would not decrease as one rose above that endless plane, but might there be some different kind of force there that serves the purpose of what we think of as gravity? Perhaps there are a number of such forces, each affecting some substances but not others, so that things made of star-stuff can hang in that sky without needing to be in what we think of as orbits. And so on. You can probably think of many reasons the world I've started to describe might not function, but then for each such problem someone else (if I'm not up to the task) might also be able to think of some way to change things so as to get around the problem and make things work. Such a world, if it can exist at all, will probably be at least as complex as ours. And we're still trying to figure out how our world works. Several times in the past we thought we knew, only to discover that what we thought we knew wasn't right after all. And had the world been as we had thought it was, it wouldn't have worked. So just because you can't figure out how to make your dream world or fairyland work doesn't mean it isn't possible. ********************* One thought that came to me recently, perhaps as a result of seeing someone's comments about over-regulation of various small businesses, was that "cosmetologists" (who are licensed in many places) is only a couple of letters different from "cosmologists" (who generally are not licensed but are less likely to be self-employed). Could I argue for licensing both or neither? And what kinds of "cosm[et]ologist" puns might I be able to make? ********************* The problem of physical laws in other possible worlds reminds me of those word games where you start with a word and change one letter to make a different word. Then you change another letter to get a still different word, and so on until you reach some target word that's the object of the game. The solution may not be obvious at first glance, but it's possible. But what if the starting word is in English and the target is in Greek or Russian? These use different alphabets, and few if any words use mixed letters from both. While it's true that the alphabets for English and Greek and Russian have some letters that look the same and can thus possibly serve as stepping stones from one language to the other, what of, say, English and Hebrew? Not only are all the letters different, but they're read in opposite directions. So which parts of what intermediate words would you read which way, assuming any intermediate words exist? These are cases where you can't get from one to the other by taking things one small step at a time. You have to abandon the old rules and make one giant leap. Likewise, there may be other realities that are as different from this one as most English words are from their Hebrew counterparts. And they may be peopled by beings who, if given a description of our reality, would laugh it off as impossible. There may indeed be more things outside Heaven and Earth than we can dream of in any of our philosophies. ********************* The Luck of the Light As I gaze at a twinkling star My mind wanders out into the void, Imagining one photon on its way across years of space To its final destiny in the rods and cones of my eye, Adding its small part to that star's twinkle. Then I think of the photons that were not so lucky As to find their way into my eye Or the eye of a friend, Or even some instrument at the observatory Where they might contribute to our knowledge Even if their beauty is lost. Their doom may come in a dust cloud Halfway here from their star, Or in a cold crater on the backside of the moon, Or perhaps a branch of that leafless tree Silhouetted against the winter sky. And there are those sad few that almost make it, Ending up against my forehead or in my eyelashes, Or perhaps knocking in vain against an eyelid during a blink: So close, but yet so far. Do the gods of the night sky amuse themselves by riding photons, Taking bets on whose will fall where? -- Tom Digby Written 18:16 02/05/2004 Edited 17:49 02/06/2004 ********************* 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. 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