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 #119 New Moon of September 14, 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. ********************* What if you had a school or work assignment to "Write about something other than the story of Mama Bear and Papa Tiger and Little Baby Bear- Tiger who's really an adopted camel"? What would you do? The problem comes if whoever is grading it sees some kind of connection between your writing and the forbidden topic. For example, if you mention smoking, they can say Camel is a major brand of cigarettes so that's an indirect mention of the baby camel who had his name changed to "Bear-Tiger" when he was adopted. Likewise, if you have a character grinning, the reviewer can bring up the phrase "Grin and bear it" which leads to puns about bears. And so on. So do we have something like the "Six Degrees of Separation" thing but with story topics instead of people? This could be turned into a contest where one side tries to discuss Topic A without getting into Topic B, while the other side's mission is to find connections, however tenuous, between their opponent's words and the forbidden topic. That could get interesting. ********************* Last issue I did a piece on how we may be becoming a surveillance-based society. This may not be a totally bad development, as long as Big Brother doesn't own all the cameras. If enough cameras are in the hands of the people, wrongdoing on the part of police and other public servants will be much better documented than in the past, making governments more accountable to those they are supposed to serve. Think of Rodney King as a poster boy for this concept. What reminded me of this was a friend who had gone to New York to protest at the Republican Convention. He says the police did some illegal things like rounding up and mass-arresting whole blocks full of people without first ordering them to disperse. I asked if people documented the illegal arrests with their cell-phone cameras and such, and he gave a definite Yes. And the lawsuits are already starting to be filed. Things should get real interesting in the courts in coming months and years. So the trend the Rodney King case was an early hint of may be starting to bear fruit on a larger scale. ********************* "It's as out of place as a theremin at a Renaissance Pleasure Faire." ********************* Various news stories related to the upcoming election and the recent political conventions, as well as some comic strips that were being shown around at a lunch get-together, gave rise to some thoughts about who really determines which direction things move in this country. I think it boils down to whoever can sway public opinion. This is partly the people who own the large media companies and TV networks, but also includes some individual celebrities such as major pop singers, who can exert some force for change once they have a large enough following and are high enough up the career ladder that the record companies are not choosing their material for them. At the grass-roots level there are people who are able to persuade their friends and neighbors one way or another. I think this tends to correlate with intelligence and education, but not always. Then on a sort of in-between level there's a new factor, people with Web sites and various kinds of online forums. If someone puts something interesting up and enough others agree with it to spread pointers around, it can reach quite a few people. This wasn't the case a generation ago. I think this latter is mostly for the good, to the degree that it's more an upward extension of the grassroots than a downward extension of Big Media. Thus the grip of the wealthy elite on the controls is weakening. Will that lead to mob rule? Possibly, although there's a fair amount of bias in favor of those who are at least rational enough to express themselves coherently in writing. That, and the technical expertise required, may tend to weed out some of the least qualified, although the tech stuff is getting to be less and less of a factor. Whatever happens, the future is going to be Interesting Times. ********************* The human body has cells called osteoblasts that build up bone and other cells called osteoclasts that break it down. They're both constantly at work, keeping things in a sort of equilibrium. Society has iconoclasts, people who break down established ideas. Does it also have iconoblasts? If so, they don't seem to be called that. ********************* There was a news story about a tribe in the Amazon jungle whose members don't know how to count above two. Their language has words for "one", "two", and "many", but not for specific numbers above two. Scientists who visited them reported that the adults can't seem to handle larger numbers when tested. The scientists were able to teach the tribe's children to count to higher numbers, even though they couldn't teach the adults. It's as if some part of the brain that handles learning basic cognitive skills shuts down after childhood. Something like this has been demonstrated in other areas for humans in general, not just that tribe. For example, it seems to be the case that children learn new languages more readily than adults do. Some adults are good at learning languages, but they are the exception. Again, some sort of language-learning system seems to shut down after childhood. If you look at what is known of human pre-history, there is a long period during which humans appear to have been physically modern but probably didn't have writing or arithmetic skills that we now take for granted. Could some of those hundreds of thousands of years have been spent slowly, through trial and error, inventing skills and concepts that could then be taught only to the children, thus taking a generation or more to spread through the tribe even if the tribe had a use for them? That leads me to wonder if there may be other skills and concepts that humans today would be easily capable of learning were they to be taught in childhood, but which are essentially unknown because no one has ever learned them. No one has stumbled onto them yet, or if they have, they haven't managed to teach them to enough children. Could some of the fringe things like telepathy and psychic channeling whose existence is a matter of debate be in this category? ********************* Do people in metric countries still speak of film "footage"? ********************* Something reminded me of one of the Moon landers or space probes or some such that had the legend "We come in peace for all mankind" on a plaque. I was also reminded of the science fiction cliche of saying "We come in peace" at any first-contact situation. Now it occurs to me that being too quick to say "We come in peace" when making contact with new cultures betrays a warlike nature, because to a truly peaceful people it would go without saying. Saying it at least hints that it may not be the default option. And if the beings you're making contact with are capable of fearing that your intentions may not be peaceful, saying it without some kind of proof that you're saying it truthfully is kind of meaningless. Or is this one of those formalities that everybody just sort of expects, no matter what either side's true intentions are? ********************* One interesting point someone made in some postings on the WELL was to compare the last half-century or so of UFO sightings with the religious manifestations of previous generations. Are UFO's and angels and Virgin Mary apparitions all part of the same underlying thing that we as yet know little or nothing about? That makes some sense to me. In fact, it probably makes more sense than the idea that we are being visited by alien civilizations that are mostly keeping themselves hidden from us but are doing a clumsy job of it, with layers and layers of secret conspiracies and government cover-ups and all that. And it makes more sense than space aliens grabbing people to do various kinds of "experiments" on, again with clumsy attempts at concealment by memory- editing and such. I was also thinking that perhaps crop circles should also be on that list. While humans have claimed responsibility for some of them, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're all human-made, Occam's Razor to the contrary. One difference between crop circles and the other things on the list is that crop circles are physical things that have some objective existence, with the main question being their origin, while flying saucers and angels and such may or may not exist in this objective reality at all. But then again, haven't UFO's now and then shown up on radar? ********************* Incident Along Fantasy Way Projections Last night I went to the Planetarium. They were doing a travelogue: "The heavens as seen from Oz, Trantor, Middle Earth, Lankhmar, Hollywood, And other legendary places." As an added attraction they had images of UFO's: Lights, disks, streaks, and various other forms Of mysterious heavenly apparitions. But something departed from the script -- A spot of light grew and grew and grew Until a door opened and a Thing emerged. "Our home planet is overcrowded," it said, "And we want you to put a brighter bulb in your projector To make our world larger and roomier." "But that would exceed our budget And besides you don't have tickets." A bureaucrat forever. Suddenly, with a flurry of tentacles into a projector previously unnoticed, The attendant was extinguished And with a quick change of slides A more cooperative one created. Request granted, farewell, and off into the artificial night Leaving me to wonder: Which projector am I coming from? Thomas G. Digby written 0200 8/01/74 entered 1205 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. 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