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 #144 New Moon of September 22, 2006 Contents copyright 2006 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 Ant Season again. No, I'm not using the term the way a hunter might, assuming they have the necessary little teeny guns. It's just that around this time of year ants tend to show up indoors, seeking I know not what. They're crawling all over the shelf by the window where I keep a bunch of potted plants, and they're using one of the legs of that shelving unit as a freeway. Should I make some itty-bitty green exit-lane signs for them, with a list of what's on each shelf? Since my food is pretty much all in the refrigerator on in sealed packages, and I don't work with food in that area anyway, they're not really a problem except for the occasional straggler that finds its way over to where I'm sitting at the computer. But I'm still curious about what they want. ********************* As I was signing up for LiveJournal (idea_fairy) I was reminded that one change in society over the last several decades is that it's gotten easier for people with statistically unusual interests to find one another. For ages, large cities have had communities of like-minded people who differed in some way from the norm. The mere fact of geographic proximity gave each individual more random contacts, leading to a greater chance of finding others. Physical meeting places such as bars and coffee houses also helped. A few dozen years ago science fiction fans were making contact through the letter columns of the magazines. That gave rise to science fiction fandom. Similar things were happening with other special-interest groups. The trend grew as the technology for printing and communicating improved. Then came computer bulletin boards and the Internet, especially the Web and search engines. Sites like LiveJournal look like a continuation of this trend. Coupled with this is greater tolerance for nonconformity. There is less pressure to blend in, to appear to be a standard person. Or at least it looks that way to me. Perhaps most people still prefer being ordinary, but I just don't notice them as much, because they prefer being ordinary. If there's nothing particularly unusual about you and you don't desire anything particularly unusual in the people you prefer to associate with, then you'll do fine with the people you come into contact with for economic or other mundane reasons no matter where you are. That's the kind of life that much of this country is still built on. Marry the girl next door and settle down and expect the same of your children. There's nothing wrong with that sort of life, but that it's not what I seem to have been destined for and I'm not drawn to the people who live that way. ********************* Some survey once asked me to rate how my life so far had measured up to my childhood expectations. They wanted it on a scale of 1 to 10. I put "6 + 8i". ********************* Speaking of gatherings of unusual people, I went to the World Science Fiction Convention a few weeks ago. A major program theme was science fiction TV shows of the 1950's. They showed some old episodes, including one where some of the action took place at a spaceport. That got me thinking. One of the sort-of-standard ideas from science fiction of the 1950's and earlier was the spaceport. It was often modeled on an airport, with terminal buildings and repair facilities and such lining the edge of a large paved area where rows of rocket ships stood between voyages. What's wrong with this picture? Rocket ships in science fiction of that era landed upright, on their tail fins, using their main engines as retro rockets. Once the ship was down there didn't seem to be any easy way to move it from one spot on the ground to another, short of using the main engines again. If there were wheels or something built into the ends of the tail fins, they were never mentioned. So there are the neat rows of rocket ships, and people are lined on on the tarmac waiting to board one. The ship may have a built-in ladder leading up to the hatch, or they may use one of those portable stairways they sometimes use today for boarding airplanes. Things are going pretty well until somebody shows up in a wheelchair. Then what? They'll probably work something out, just like airlines do today when a plane can't pull up to a jetway. But now comes a bigger problem. As passengers are boarding your rocket ship, the one next to you takes off. If they're parked a few hundred feet apart like you see on the covers of old science fiction magazines, and they use anything like real rocket engines, things can get rather unpleasant. Landings have similar problems, with an added concern: What if an incoming ship crashes? Perhaps the retro rockets don't fire when they should, or the pilot makes a mistake and lands on top of an adjacent ship? Things can get real bad real quickly. So you don't try to land close to other ships. You have a special area a couple of miles across for landings and takeoffs. But if the ship is to remain there for any length of time all that real estate can get expensive. You need some way of moving the ships between the landing zone and the parking area. So how do you do that? Anything practical is likely to not look like what you used to see on those old magazine covers. Wheels on the ends of the tail fins, like casters on a giant office chair? That might be OK if the ship only lands on paved surfaces, but what of exploration ships that may land on random terrain? (Rocket ships with pointy tail fins landing on soft ground would have other problems, as would rocket ships landing in forests or grasslands they don't want to set on fire. But that's for another time.) How about making the wheels retractable? Possibly, but now we're talking considerable added weight. What might work is some kind of ground vehicle that can clamp onto a tail fin, lift the ship a few inches, and take it to whatever part of the spaceport it needs to get to. Tail fin designs would need to be somewhat standardized with lifting points built in, but that's probably a lot more practical than retractable wheels. Has anybody written this kind of thing into their stories? ********************* I bought one of those folding plastic carts at Office Depot. It unfolds into a bin with wheels on two corners, with a handle sort of like on those wheeled suitcases you see nowadays. There was one slightly goofy thing: The directions on how to unfold the cart were on a piece of paper tucked inside where you couldn't get at it (or even see it) until after you had the cart unfolded. That doesn't seem quite right to me. Fortunately it wasn't hard to figure out even without the instructions. ********************* One brand of chocolate I like has wrappers with little sayings printed on them, sort of like fortune cookies. One says "Go for a hay ride with friends." That leads me to wonder what a hay ride with enemies would be like. I'm probably just as well off not knowing. Or perhaps I'd be better able to defend myself in the future if I knew, but it's not the kind of thing I'd want to find out by first-hand experience. Reading about it, or hearing others' accounts of similar experiences, would probably suffice. That in turn leads me to wonder who my enemies are. There are those who count all Americans as enemies, and there are others who disagree strongly with my politics, and there were people I didn't get along with back in school, but other than those and other general categories such as business competitors do I really have any enemies? None come to mind. Of course that could just mean they're being stealthy about it. I suppose I could advertise a "Hay Ride for Tom Digby's Enemies" and see who shows up, but somehow I doubt that would give reliable data. ********************* You know that Escher drawing with the room full of people walking around sideways and upside down on each other's walls and ceilings? Think of how useful that would be for tasks like changing light bulbs. ********************* At Cartoonland State Prison: ASSISTANT: "We have a problem with 3579545. He says his sentence is up and he wants us to release him." WARDEN: "So check his file. See what the court records say." ASSISTANT: [handing over folder] "That's the problem. There are no court records on him." WARDEN: [leafing through contents of folder] "Nothing?" ASSISTANT: "Nothing. He was a superhero drop-off case." WARDEN: "Huh?" ASSISTANT: "One of those flying super-heros brought him in. Landed in the exercise yard, handed him over to a guard, and said to tell the warden to give him about twenty years. All very informal. So now the twenty years are up, and he wants out." WARDEN: "No trial? I didn't know that kind of thing was legal." ASSISTANT: "They've since outlawed it. Somebody sued or something. But this was before that." WARDEN: "Didn't anybody keep notes?" ASSISTANT: "Apparently not. We had to give him a number and assign him a cell, so we got a record of how long he's been here. But the warden we had back then thought he could remember the rest and didn't bother to write any of it down. So we don't know how long a sentence the superhero actually recommended. Was it twenty years, or was it longer? Maybe it's up and maybe it isn't. So what do we do?" WARDEN: "Have you checked with the superhero?" ASSISTANT: "We tried, but we're not sure which one it was, and none of the ones we asked could recall anything about that case." WARDEN: "Let me think about this." ASSISTANT: "And maybe you'd better talk to a lawyer." WARDEN: "That's probably a good idea." ********************* Pets shops in Cartoonland have Generic Snake by the yard. Reel off as much as you want, splice on a head and tail, zap it with the Animation Ray, and away you go. Some people think it's funny to do stuff like putting together a snake with heads on both ends, but that's kind of frowned on. If the two heads don't get along it could be considered animal cruelty. Others have tried splicing a length of body into a closed loop with no head or tail so it crawls round and round forever without getting anywhere. Some like to wear that kind of thing as a necklace. But with no head and thus no mouth, it has no way to eat and eventually starves. So it's not recommended. Snake-wise, it's best to stick to the tried and true. ********************* There was another news story about airport security people taking exception to someone's T-shirt, this time because it had Arabic writing on it. I guess they thought it was like wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a fire to a crowded theater. ********************* Lost Poem At the reading one of the poets announced that she had lost a poem. Could any of us help her find it? Please be on the lookout. I've lost poems of my own over the years. Sometimes the Muse dropped by when I was busy, Or the phone would ring at an inopportune time. Be the reasons as they may, I could relate to her loss. So I kept my eyes open. There! See that spider weaving her web, Strands glimmering in the moonlight? Is she spinning them from lines of the poem? Are those cloud-like bits of it adrift high in the night sky? And are the katydids playing word games with what's left? I'm afraid that poem has been scattered to the four winds. We will never recapture it all. But I can hope that the best of it will find its way Into other poems By other poets Who chance to be luckier than we. -- Thomas G. Digby 23:05 Fri September 1 2006 13:55 Fri September 22 2006 ********************* 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. 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