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 #239 New Moon of May 28, 2014 Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* May has given way to June. Back when I was young that meant we were within a day or two one way or the other of the end of the school year. It was a time to look forward to being able to relax and enjoy unstructured time. Now I tend to think of spring as more of a time when the world sort of wakes up. For the past few months days have been getting longer and longer. We're now at a time when the days will still get a little bit longer before they start getting shorter again, but they're almost as long as they're ever going to get. It has also been a time of gradually noticing that I was no longer having to deal with cold weather. Just a couple of weeks ago it finally felt like it was time to turn my heater pilot off for the summer. Now I'm thinking about how it's going to start getting hot soon. Being too hot can be worse than being cold. I like the evening light, even if I don't like the heat, but I won't really be rid of the heat until the days have gotten significantly shorter again. I go through this every year. I'm reminded of that Sixties rock song "The Beat Goes On" (Sonny & Cher). ********************* "The hotel our convention was at is doing some kind of weird art exhibit. I don't know what it's called but it's some kind of surrealistic installation that looks like random furniture and such floating overhead in the atrium." "That's just random furniture and such." "I would think they could have come up with a better title than that." "It's not really art. It's storage." "Huh?" "You know how some conventions fill up the hotel's exhibit space and end up having parties and such in regular sleeping rooms? Many of those party hosts would like to take the beds out of their rooms so they can have more room for people to stand around at their parties." "Yes, but hotels seem reluctant to do that for some reason." "One big reason is that they don't have space to store the stuff they take out of the rooms. Or at least they didn't, until recently." "So what happened?" "Our convention hotel had a UFO convention, and someone managed to get a bunch of anti-gravity stickers from some advanced civilization or other. Even though they're beyond Earth technology, they're quite common on quite a few planets so the hotel was able to get several hundred of them for just a few bucks." "Anti-gravity stickers?" "Yes. You stick one on an object and it neutralizes the effect of gravity on that object, so you can put it up in the air and it will just stay there. So now they're using all that previously wasted overhead space in the atrium for storage." "How do they get the things back? They're too high to reach." "There are a couple of hotel employees who are into fishing, and are pretty good with a rod and reel. They just cast a hook (unbaited, so the furniture doesn't end up smelling like worms or rotten shrimp or whatever), snag the piece they want, and reel it in." "Does anything ever go wrong?" "One time they were moving a piano from one wing of the hotel to the other. That normally takes two or three people or a fork lift or something, but someone thought that with a couple of those anti-gravity stickers one person would be able to handle it. It went OK until he had to cross a courtyard, and a gust of wind came up at just the wrong time and the piano got away. They still haven't found it." "How far could it have gone?" "Quite a ways. Those stickers don't wear out the way helium leaks out of balloons, and since they don't depend on air density for lift there's no altitude limit like there is with balloons. That piano could be halfway to the Moon by now." "So posting LOST PIANO posters around the neighborhood probably won't do much good." "Probably not. And if this comes to the attention of the FAA or NASA or some other such agency the hotel could get in trouble. So they've been keeping it quiet." "That makes sense, even though I think it would be safer to put out warnings to airlines and people launching space missions and such to be on the lookout for it." ********************* I recently bought an electric fan, and it came with a card to fill in and mail back to register the warranty. One thing I noticed about the form is that it had a space to put your date of birth, and then farther down it had a set of boxes to check for your age group (18-24, 25-39, and so on). So why do they need to ask your age if they already know your date of birth? Can't they just calculate it? Then the thought hit me: Time travelers. Once you get into time travel there's no longer a simple relationship between your birth date and your age. I don't know why time travelers would be especially likely to buy electric fans, but then maybe the company makes other things I'm not aware of that are of more interest to time travelers than electric fans are. I don't recall seeing anything unusual in the store, but maybe the time travel stuff is in the back and you have to ask for it, using secret words only time travelers and store employees know. So the next time you're in one of those big-box hardware stores, be on the lookout for customers asking weird questions full of seemingly nonsensical words or phrases. They might be time travelers. ********************* One of the suggestions I hear for saving water is to not flush the toilet for Number One: "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down." That has a problem in that if too long a time goes by with nobody doing poo-poo, the accumulated pee can get rather unattractive. A possible solution is to flip a coin: Heads you flush, tails you don't (always flushing for doo-doo). That cuts down the average time stuff is likely to sit there without getting flushed, while still achieving about half the savings of the original proposal. If you want to realize greater savings you can get fancy by throwing a D4 or D6 and flushing only if it comes up a 1. Anything beyond that gets into diminishing returns. ********************* People on one social networking site who want to keep their real-world personal information private have taken to listing their location as Antarctica. Those who don't want their age generally known (management doesn't seem to care as long as they're over 18) have been claiming the earliest birth date the software allows, which currently puts them in their mid-nineties. That led me to thoughts of establishing old-age homes at the South Pole. And then I got to thinking about zombies. I would think that zombies wouldn't rot in Antarctica because of the cold. So do they stay functional longer there? Or has rotting flesh never been a problem? Do they need actual muscle tissue to move, or is some other mechanism involved? Zombies in the movies often look like their flesh is rotting away, but it doesn't seem to stop them from functioning. So maybe moving them to the South Pole wouldn't make much difference. On the other hand, a zombie with most of the tissues around its joints intact might freeze solid and be too stiff to move. Has anyone done any tests on this? Even if that doesn't immobilize them, freezing them in a block of ice should. Either way, being able to freeze zombies may be useful. Maybe people who don't want to become zombies after they die should go to Antarctica while they're still alive. That way when they die they can be set outside to freeze and it won't matter if they become zombies or not because they won't be able to go around doing zombie-type stuff. The only danger is global warming. The first thing that will happen after the climate in Antarctica turns warm is that all those old-age homes full of people in their nineties will get too hot because they don't have air conditioning, and many residents will die sooner than they otherwise would. Then when they stack the dead bodies outside they won't freeze. They'll become active zombies. And don't forget all those previously frozen zombies that will thaw and become active. Meanwhile the ice cap will have melted, which will raise the sea level, and everybody everywhere else will be too busy dealing with that to worry about reports of zombies at the South Pole. So once Antarctica has been warm long enough to grow trees the zombies will make canoes and sail north and ravage what's left of the rest of the world. So if you're in any position where you may need to deal with global warming, put this on your list of things to check before you get canoes full of rotting zombies paddling in through your upstairs windows. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!! ********************* Incident Along Fantasy Way Convention Report For a time I thought my Muse had deserted me. But no, she had only gone to their convention And she gave me a partial report. The days were taken up with the official program: Panels and seminars and papers On "Estimating the Connectivity of Disparate Ideas" And "New Techniques for the Management of Fertile Minds" And "The Topology of the Subconscious in Spaces of N Dimensions" And so on, on and on and on, Until at last, The late evening social sessions. Here were the constant arguments between the Muses Of Crime And of Punishment, Juicy tidbits from the Muse of Gossip, Rumors of parties hosted by the Muses of Sex (Gay and straight and what-have-you), The Muse of Animated Cartooning crying about hard times And Saturday morning TV And being promised help by the Muses Of Electronic Design And of Computer Programming. Crowds held spellbound by the Muse of Witty Conversation, And the bright child-fantasies of Muses Of arts not yet invented. And, over and through all, The Eternal Question, About which even the gods can only speculate: "Who inspires the Muses?" -- Thomas G. Digby written 0055 hr 9/09/74 entered 2200 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 you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. If the headers include a line like this: Silicon Soapware zine with reader comments you are getting it via the list that allows comments (some software may hide part of the line, but there should be enough visible to recognize it). To comment, simply email your comment to ss_talk@lists.plergb.com (which you can often do by hitting "Reply All" or "Reply to List") from the address at which you got the zine. The list will not accept comments from non-member addresses. If the Subject line includes the phrase "SS_Talk Digest" you are getting the digest version. 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