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 #189 New Moon of May 13, 2010 Contents copyright 2010 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. ********************* I've been doing a bit of spring cleaning. It wasn't all that much, mostly just dumping some clutter, but it gave me a feeling of having accomplished something. So now I don't feel like the place is about to turn into one of those puzzles with the fifteen little plastic squares in the four-by-four frame, where the only way to do anything is in terms of the one vacant space in the array. Now I can get to some stuff that had been blocked, and I have room to work at sorting other piles of stuff. And once I get into that I expect a fair chunk of those piles to also be stuff that can get the old heave-ho. So this may actually be progress. ********************* More Weird Fast-Food Cashier Tales: I went out to a fast-food place for dinner. When I ordered my total came to $4.91. Since I had plenty of pennies I decided to give the clerk $20.01, expecting $15.10 in change. First I handed him a penny. Then as I was looking in my wallet for the twenty, he stepped away from the register to attend to other stuff. When he returned I handed him the twenty, whereupon he rang it up and started to give me $15.09 in change. So I reminded him: "Didn't I give you a penny?" "Oh yes," he replied, "$15.08," and proceeded to take back one of the pennies he'd been about to give me. This all happened too quickly for me to think of a good reply, and besides it hardly seemed worth arguing about, especially since other customers were waiting and I didn't know how long a discussion of the matter might take. It reminded me of when another fast-food place got my order wrong. There they had changed servers in mid-transaction. So I think that any sort of interruption tends to increase the chances of errors. Likewise with attempts to multi-task. I'm also reminded of a newspaper columnist who used restaurant service as a barometer of the economy. The more people are looking for work, the easier it is for restaurants to get good help, or so his theory went. Thus bad service in restaurants should be good news. So was I witnessing the long-awaited economic recovery? ********************* A couple of weeks ago I attended a celebration where they had a King and Queen of the May. I've seen this in prior years also. But how come they never seem to have a Prime Minister of the May, or a Chancellor of the Exchequer of the May, or a Parliament of the May ... ********************* That May Day celebration also included a potluck buffet. Afterward I heard someone commenting about the large amounts of food people were throwing away. It reminded me that I'd noticed people discarding nearly-full plates of food at other events in the past. My theory is that there are two strategies you can use at buffet events: "naughty" and "nice". The "nice" one is to take a small sample of everything. Then after you've decided which ones you really want, come back through the line again for full servings of just those items. The "naughty" approach is to take a heaping helping of everything, more than you'll possibly have room for. Then you eat the stuff you find most appealing and dump the rest. This is similar to the "Prisoner's Dilemma" in that if everybody follows the "nice" strategy things will work out pretty well, but if some do the "naughty" thing the "nice" people will be out of luck because there won't be anything left by the time they've decided what they want. And then if everybody is more or less forced to play "naughty" in self-defense, the food runs out quickly and only those lucky enough to be first in line get anything. There may be no good solution other than having someone enforcing niceness. ********************* Back in seventh or eighth grade biology class we did the experiment of soaking some leaves or blades of grass or some such in water for a few days and then looking at the liquid under a microscope. It was teeming with microscopic organisms. So far, so good. Then someone, perhaps the teacher, took what appears in retrospect to be a leap of loose logic. He dissolved a couple of aspirin tablets in some water, then squirted some of the solution onto the slide. Lo and behold, the microbes were gone. I think his logic was that what we'd been looking at were "germs". Since germs make people sick, and medicine makes people well, medicine will get rid of germs. And since aspirin was medicine, squirting aspirin onto the "germs" on the slide should get rid of them. But even though the "germs" were gone after he'd squirted the "medicine" onto the slide, they left no remains. According to his theory, I would have expected the field of view to be full of dead germs. But it wasn't. So what I think happened is that the water with the aspirin dissolved in it had washed the microbes off to the side, where we couldn't see them. Whether they were alive or dead didn't matter. I didn't say anything at the time, mostly because I didn't really think this through until later. ********************* As I was typing the above I mistyped the word "organism" in such a way that the spelling checker's first suggestion was "orgasm". Had I taken that suggestion the sentence near the end of the first paragraph would have stated that the liquid under the microscope was "teeming with microscopic orgasms." I have no idea what such a thing would have looked like under the microscope. ********************* Another thing in junior high felt like sexual discrimination. The room my biology class was in was on the second floor of the school building. Early in the spring semester some birds built their nest on the window ledge outside that room. The teacher noticed it, or maybe someone told him. Either way, he told all the girls about it so they could watch the eggs hatching and the mother birds feeding their young and all that. But he didn't tell the boys, and told the girls not to tell the boys. Later, after the baby birds had flown away, he did tell the whole class. His stated reason for keeping it secret from the boys was that "the boys" (unclear as to which or how many) would have dropped rocks on the nest. Regardless of how valid this concern was (and some of the boys might well have vandalized the nest if they had known about it), I felt kind of unfairly stereotyped. Were such a thing to happen today some of the boys' parents might well sue the school for discrimination or some such. But back then, at least in that place, suing your school for something like that was Just Not Done. ********************* Speaking of things that are Just Not Done, I recall when some sort of Time Patrol was a more or less standard science fiction thing. If time travel is ever invented, so the theory goes, the time-space continuum becomes infested with people going back and trying to do stuff that didn't happen. So some sort of trans-temporal police force is needed. Hence the Time Patrol, or whatever the author of a particular story wants to call it. Sadly, what with this new-fangled Internet thing, I've neglected my science-fiction reading lately. So is the Time Patrol still around, or has it faded? And if it's no longer around, why did it go and what has taken its place? ********************* More stuff that's Just Not Done, this time at a local fast-food place. There was a man there who appeared to have mental problems. He was standing near the counter, putting his hands up in front of his face and wiggling his fingers while making wordless noises. He was also rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, but otherwise wasn't moving around much. After a couple of minutes of this another person who had been waiting at the counter got their food and they left together. I'm guessing this second person was a caregiver of some sort. This episode got me to thinking. The question in my mind wasn't really why this person was doing stuff like wiggling his fingers in front of his face and making strange noises. It was more like why nobody else was doing it. There were no "DON'T MAKE STRANGE GESTURES AND NONSENSE NOISES UNLESS THERE'S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU" signs visible anywhere in the area. So if you're standing there waiting for your order to be prepared, and you have nothing better to do right then, why not do that? Likewise, out on the street there were no "DON'T MARCH ALONG WHILE COUNTING CADENCE IN SOME NONSENSE LANGUAGE YOU JUST MADE UP" signs, but even without the signs nobody ever seems to do it. But again, if you have nothing better to do, and aren't blocking traffic or anything like that, why not? If nothing else, it may be good exercise. Someone might reply that people will think you're crazy. But why are crazy people allowed to do things other people aren't? If anything, it would seem logical to restrict their actions more than those of normal people. After all, they're more likely to hurt themselves or others than someone who's rational enough to know when to stop doing something. Of course there's the problem that if you put up signs telling crazy people not to do something, they may not be rational enough to understand and comply. So putting up such signs is likely to be a waste of money. And considering the huge number of things crazy people shouldn't do, it would be a huge waste of money. Given the state of the budget nowadays, I can see why they might want to avoid that expenditure. Likewise, they're not likely to put up signs telling normal people not to do any of that long list of things. But that still leaves the question of why people who aren't crazy seem to think they see "DON'T DO [whatever]" signs all over the place. ********************* Alternate Routes He was crazy. We all knew that. All his talk of strange exotic lands he would someday run away to proved it, Since it was well known That here was the only place there was. Still, he could be quite convincing So we had to keep reminding ourselves That he was crazy. Further proof: One night late, driving home from a party or something, As he approached the curve in the road We saw him signal to turn right. He tried to explain about another road to the left They had taught us not to see But that only proved How crazy he was. And so we went, Being careful not to look too hard as we passed the curve, Until One night late, driving home from a party or something, As he approached the curve in the road We saw him signal to turn left And vanish. We all stood there, Telling each other that we could see, Way down in the canyon, His flaming wreckage. I felt it best not to mention That to me the faint red glow Looked more like tail lights Dwindling toward the horizon. Thomas G. Digby written 0420 hr 5/17/80 entered 2115 hr 2/08/92 ********************* 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. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --