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 #160 New Moon of January 8, 2008 Contents copyright 2008 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. ********************* This issue is coming out just a few days after my birthday. Had I had a cake, there would have been 68 candles on it. I'm reminded that when I was little birthday candles came three dozen to a box. I recall thinking that one would have to be really old to use a whole box of 36 birthday candles all at once. Now I'm only a few years away from using up two such boxes and starting on a third. Statistically I'm not likely to live long enough to use up three boxes and start on a fourth, and I don't think anyone has ever managed to use up four boxes. Of course it's faintly possible that someone has lived that long, but if so it wasn't documented in any credible manner. But what with the way medical science has been progressing in recent years, such long life spans can't be ruled out for the future. Will the makers of birthday candles be able to keep up with demand? Even if the population stabilizes, if the average age of the population increases, the demand for birthday candles will increase along with it. Of course there's the option of doing virtual birthday cakes on computers. We pretty much have the technology for it now. All we need is some kind of low-cost air-movement detector so real-world people will be able to blow their virtual candles out. The rest is software. This is Silicon Valley. Is this worth starting a startup for? I kind of doubt it, but you never know what people will pay money for. ********************* More birthday memories: My sister's birthday is a week before mine, at least if you think in terms of seasons rather than calendar years. Had I been born a week earlier, or she a week later, we would have been exactly five years apart. As a result of that timing, our birthdays tended to get lost in the general holiday mania. Hers came between Christmas and New Year's, while mine was soon enough after New Year's that many people were in post-holiday recuperation mode and not really in the mood to celebrate anything. Often as not our parents would just take us out to dinner or something sometime between our birthdays, and that would be It for both of us birthday-wise. They would also give us a few presents, but not many, especially when viewed in comparison to what we had just gotten for Christmas. They did do birthday parties for us now and then, but all in all we didn't get nearly as many parties as the people whose birthdays came at other times of year seemed to get. ********************* As long as we're reminiscing about childhood memories, something reminded me of a kitchen ritual we referred to as "coloring the butter", although the substance in question was actually margarine. This was right after the end of World War II. Apparently butter was in short supply during the war, so people used margarine instead. But then after the war ended the dairy companies wanted to get people out of the margarine-buying habit. So they passed laws restricting the sale of artificially colored margarine. So what you got when you bought margarine was a block of white stuff with a little packet of dye. Consumers were expected to mix the yellow dye into the white margarine themselves. We would let the package warm up enough to get soft, then unwrap the white margarine and put it in a mixing bowl. Then we would add the dye and knead the mixture until the whole mess was an even yellow color. It was about as close as we kids ever came to having permission to in effect play with food. Later on, margarine came in a transparent plastic bag you could knead without actually getting your hands all slick and buttery. I didn't find that to be as much fun, even if the adults preferred it over the older method. Then after Dad changed jobs and we moved to another state we could buy margarine already colored. So that was the end of the family ritual of "coloring the butter". ********************* Then there was the Christmas Santa brought a small bag of fireworks. A few nights later we went to visit a relative who had a larger yard than we did, and set them off there. In contrast to the situation today, everyone just sort of accepted the idea that people would set off fireworks in their yards. Nowadays the authorities are trying to put a stop to the practice. Around the year-end holidays and also around the Fourth of July you'll see announcements about how there's no need for people to do their own fireworks because they can go to professionally-run fireworks displays instead. But people still do their own, even when there are laws against it. To me it feels analogous to a bunch of people sitting around in their living room singing instead of going to professionally-run operas and concerts and such. In an apartment building the landlord may try to persuade people to go to concerts instead of having singalong parties in their apartments, but the parties continue. Telling people there's no need for them to do their own singing because the professional singers at the concerts are better won't persuade them. The problem is that, official statements to the contrary, the singalong parties in people's homes do fill a need. It's not just the music itself. It's social bonding and a chance to participate in some group activity rather than being just passive spectators. And it's also about having some control over what gets presented when. You get to enjoy personal favorites that may not be popular enough or well enough known to be included in large public performancez. That's what the people who pass anti-fireworks laws seem not to be aware of. Or maybe they are aware of it, but believe they can sweep it under the rug. Have they noticed how lumpy that part of the rug feels? ********************* Speaking of winter, they say that no two snowflakes are alike. Does that mean that once Jack Frost (or whoever is in charge of such things) has assigned a particular pattern to a snowflake, that pattern can never be used again? Or does the "no two alike" rule mean only that there will be no two identical snowflakes in existence at any one time? In other words, can a given pattern be reused once whatever snowflake it had been assigned to has melted? If patterns do get reused, does photographing a snowflake under a microscope mean that that snowflake's pattern will need to be permanently retired lest someone find a snowflake just like the one in the photograph? There's also the problem of drawings of snowflakes. Does that count toward using up a pattern? It can be argued either way. Has there ever been any official ruling on the matter? Another thought on how the weather gods might get lazy and fudge things: If they can see the future, and if the vast majority of snowflakes never really get looked at on an individual basis, perhaps the "no two alike" rule applies only to snowflakes that are destined to get looked at. The ones destined to melt away sight unseen could all be based on somevsmall number of generic no-frills patterns and no one would be the wiser. So it's possible that the "no two alike" thing is bogus, but that nobody will ever be able to prove it. ********************* A little more seriously, why are snowflakes symmetrical? In other words, how does a water molecule that's about to stick to a snowflake "know" what's happening to the other 5/6 of the flake so it can find a spot where it won't mess up the overall symmetry? ********************* This is the season to be thankful for a nice warm bed on cold nights. That brings to mind the fashion designer or columnist or some such who wanted to do an article on sleeping garments, with pictures of various celebrities wearing whatever nightgowns or pajamas or the like they slept in. Problem: Many of the subjects slept nude. And the magazine he was writing the article for wasn't the type of zine that would want to print photos of naked people, even if they were celebrities. So he changed the question to what would they sleep in if they didn't sleep nude. With that info he was able to create their hypothetical night-wear and photograph them wearing it. Thus he was able to write the article, even if it wasn't what he expected when he first started work on it. ********************* The phrase "antimatter Cthulhu" sort of popped into my head, leading me to look up the spelling of "Cthulhu" on the Internet. I found it the first place I looked, the Wikipedia article on Lovecraft. According to the article, Lovecraft died in 1937, which meant he never saw the rise of computers, or even television, as part of everyday life. How might his stories have been different had he lived into the 1980's and 1990's (he was born in 1890) and continued writing until the end? Anyway, back to "antimatter Cthulhu". Do the concepts of "matter" and "antimatter" even apply? Do our physical laws apply in whatever realms the Old Ones inhabit when they're not wreaking havoc here? And when the Old Ones do manifest here, do the forms they take interact with our physical world, or are they more like dreams and hallucinations? Assuming they do interact with our physical world, which would be worse: A matter-antimatter explosion when Antimatter Cthulhu tries to manifest, or the havoc he would wreak should he succeed in existing here? I suspect this is one of those things it's hard to make valid predictions about. Another thought: Antimatter Cthulhu might be the opposite of regular Cthulhu in other ways besides being antimatter. For example, what if he's all sweetness and light, but not all that smart? He comes to try to undo the damage done by his evil twin, but keeps touching matter and blowing up, thus doing more damage than had he not gotten involved in the first place. That's why the evil regular Cthulhu doesn't try to interfere with non-evil Antimatter Cthulhu's plans. I don't think this is covered very well in the original canon. Why isn't it? Physicists were starting to work on the concept of antimatter before Lovecraft's death. Did he just happen not to read the relevant journals and news articles, or did he deliberately decide not to get into these questions, or what? Inquiring minds want to know. ********************* Question: Is psychic (or magical) energy (as distinct from physical energy) conserved? Or does it matter, since people don't seem to be into measuring it and putting numbers on it? If it is conserved, does that mean it can be used up? If it isn't, does that mean we need never worry about supplies running low? ********************* All the reminiscing about birthdays and childhood memories and such right around the start of a new year reminds me of this: The Almanac The almanac for the coming year is here. I thumb through the astronomical section: It's stuff I'll want to look up later about Solstices and equinoxes, maybe an eclipse or two, But not really reading material. Other articles and even some of the ads are more interesting. But then I come to the calendar pages, One for each month of the new year. January looms as a long block of back-to-work post-Christmas gray. The groundhogs and valentines and long-dead presidents of February offer scant consolation. But then we come to March and April, with their bright promises of springtime. May brings childhood memories of counting the days until school lets out for the summer. Even now, with my school days long past, May always seems a time of transition, a reminder of the passage of the years. As winter howls outside my window June and July seem unreal, Just as winter will seem unreal when June and July are here. The sight of August brings a hint of melancholy, A reminder that the days of summer are numbered And the sun must once again journey southward. Then comes September, with falling leaves Swirling down into October and November. Halloween and Thanksgiving lead my thoughts to festive December, When winter once again howls outside my window As I leaf through yet another new almanac for yet another new year. -- Tom Digby Original 15:29 12/20/2002 Edited 21:05 12/27/2002 Edited 19:05 01/02/2003 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. 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