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 #130 New Moon of August 4, 2005 Contents copyright 2005 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. ********************* It's August, a month that to me has long had vague connotations of melancholy despite it still definitely being summertime. I think it comes from my childhood. when the coming of August meant that school would be starting in a few more weeks. Even though it was still summer, we knew that that season's days were numbered, especially when the stores started their big "Back to School" sales. I should say that school wasn't all bad. Much of what was taught was interesting. But I didn't like having to get up early every morning in a chilly house where we didn't normally run the heater while we slept, so as to be out the door and on my way at the specified time. Also, homework wasn't always the most enjoyable way to spend an evening. So like most kids I looked forward to days of no school, even though I liked some aspects of school. August is also when we see the days definitely starting to get shorter. They've actually been getting shorter since the Solstice in late June, but now the difference from day to day and week to week is increasing as we approach the Equinox. This is also, at least in this area, the hottest time of year. In a way that may be for the best, because the eventual relief from the heat as autumn arrives is a sort of consolation for the loss of summer. ********************* Once again I see squirrels outside my window, running along overhead wires. Is the propensity to do that genetic? What would squirrels from, say, 200 years ago, before the telegraph, do if brought into our modern world? Would they run along the lines like today's squirrels, perhaps thinking them some new kind of vine, or would they avoid them because some genetic tendency to run along wires wasn't there? And would more of them get run over because they don't have a hard-wired tendency to watch for cars? City squirrels and country squirrels. Would they show inherited differences in behavior with respect to humans and cars and overhead wires and such? Has anybody done research in this area? ********************* A few days ago as I was sitting here trying to think of something to write about, the clouds parted and the sun shone forth. The radio spoke of blue skies to be expected later in the day. Part of me welcomed that prospect. But another part of me, dulled with early morning blahs, wondered what good sunshine and blue skies were in the larger scheme of things when I had nothing to write about. Sure, some plants may find the increased light useful for photosynthesis, and I can use the oxygen. But then somehow I got to thinking about how plants don't really think about my creativity or lack thereof when they ask themselves why they should care about me and whether or not I should like sunshine. If plants were to ask such questions, I don't think I would have a good answer. I kind of suspect they would find me more useful as compost than as a writer or poet or whatever. But then do I really want to base my self-image on what plants might find me useful for? Although that might be something to take into account, the opinions of other humans carry far more weight, or at least I think they do. Of course somebody might well end up getting rich writing a self-help book based on working to improve what plants think about you, but I'm pretty sure I'm not that person. ********************* Actually it's not all that unusual for me to think that I have nothing to write about. So should I write about Nothing? Vacuum? The Void? Is there such a thing? Scientists have told us that there may be little pockets of Nothing all around us, in between parts of our atoms. They have long said that an atom is mostly empty space. Or does the seething quantum foam they've theorized about in more recent years eliminate that possibility, even on the tiniest scales where the energy required for the shorter wavelengths goes to infinity? On the other end of the scale, what about the vast emptiness between galaxies? That's not really empty. Even if you discount the quantum foam, there's light from various distant galaxies passing through on its way to wherever it may end up, perhaps in other distant galaxies millions of years hence. And every here and there one may find a hydrogen atom. But there may be possibilities in that direction, if you go far enough. We don't know what, if anything, lies beyond the boundaries of our universe. Perhaps all we will ever know or be is a speck in some larger universal Void. So if you are looking for some kind of Nothing to write about, as distinct from not writing about anything, both ends of the size and distance scales seem more promising than the middle. ********************* Somebody on a tech list about the inner workings of computers asked what you get when you read an empty location, one that doesn't have any memory or other hardware at that address. The answer is that you generally don't know, although if you know something about the hardware you can make fairly good guesses based on technical things like bus capacitance, whether addresses are fully decoded, address-data multiplexing, and so on. I found part of me wondering if it might be digital samples of the sound of one hand clapping. But alas, it is almost certainly not that. ********************* I recently saw that new movie version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory". I liked it, even though it differed from the earlier movie in a number of ways. There are some things I can probably note without giving away any significant plot points. Much of the action takes place in a candy factory, in a sort of fantasy world. And I'm an engineer. What this meant was that the engineering part of me would now and then think about how things like people dancing on narrow catwalks with no railings, or rowing boats on lakes of melted chocolate, would not pass muster with the likes of OSHA in the real world. And the people who enforce zoning and immigration and labor laws might have something to say about employees brought in from overseas living on the premises and being paid in cacao beans. But that didn't stop the rest of me from enjoying the movie. It did give me an idea for a sort of short comedy bit: An OSHA inspector takes his family to see this or some similar movie, and he can't help reciting all the violations he sees. Mom and the kids keep trying to tell him to just shut up and watch the movie, but to little avail. It might end with him annoying the rest of the audience enough to get thrown out. And as this happens, he's complaining about how they're throwing him out. Maybe they kick him too hard when they send him flying out the door, or the street they throw him out into is dirty, or something like that. But then the bouncer says the theater is immune to such rules because this is, after all, a cartoon. ********************* At a dinner get-together a few nights ago, one person was wearing some kind of hands-free cell-phone earpiece. He was talking in terms of wearing something like that all day, and maybe even when he slept. I commented that I wouldn't want to live such an interrupt-driven life, whereupon he replied that he had an interrupt-driven brain. I wonder how many people share his feelings about that, how many share mine, and how many are along a spectrum in between? ********************* In more mundane news, the world is still trundling along, more or less in one piece. Nothing major seems to have blown up over the last few hours, or at least nothing major enough to make the KCBS news page on the Web. Of course that's just the stuff they tell us about. There could be all sorts of momentous happenings involving empires and kingdoms whose very existence has long been a closely guarded secret. How do we know, for example, that the vast expanses of blue shown on the standard maps as oceans are not really a cover-up for countries, even whole continents, they don't want us to know about? Just because airlines claim not to fly to those places (and the people behind the counter look at you funny when you even ask) doesn't mean they aren't there. Of course once you get to thinking about all the things that supposedly don't exist but actually might, you can get into all kinds of mental quagmires. Do I really want to go there? I might or might not, depending on what the place is like. But what if I do? How might I best equip myself for such an expedition? Physical gear such as rafts and wading boots for swamps and quagmires probably won't really be all that applicable, at least in the initial stages. What would probably be more useful would be anger-management training so as to be able to handle all the denials and frustration and people looking at you funny for asking about all that weird stuff. Also get some good legal advice on how crazy you can appear to be and still not be in danger of being locked up. And just in case the advice is a little off, or the people in charge of locking crazy people up don't always follow the law, have some good lawyers on tap, along with friends checking up on you periodically in case you just sort of disappear or something. You can't be too paranoid. Well, maybe you can, but you have to balance that possibility against the dangers of not being paranoid enough. ********************* What if some doctor or scientist or some such discovers some new disease or theory or something that would normally be named after them because they discovered it, but there's already another theory or disease or whatever named after somebody else with the same name? How do they resolve the conflict? ********************* Speaking of it getting close to "Back to School" season: Incident Along Fantasy Way 0830 hr 7/30/74 Arithmetic Lesson Arithmetic along Fantasy Way is Different. You CAN add apples and oranges. TEACHER: "What do you get when you add coaches and pumpkins?" "Cinderella!" the class shouts back. "But what else?" Everybody talking at once: "You can turn those old junk cars into ..." "But you'll get rotten pumpkins!" "But they're still biodegradable!" "Make costumes for cars at Halloween!" "And string lights on them at Christmas!" "And hide them at Easter!" Arithmetic along Fantasy Way is Different. There are no wrong answers. Thomas G. Digby written 0830 hr 7/30/74 entered 2125 hr 2/08/92 ********************* 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. 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