SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/user/bubbles/ Issue #57 New Moon of September 9, 1999 Contents copyright 1999 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. If you don't want to read about the mechanics of this, skip down to the row of asterisks (****). If you're getting it via email and the headers show the originating site as "lists.best.com" you're getting the list version, and anything you send to DigbyZine@lists.best.com will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation (although so far traffic has been light). If there's no mention of "lists.best.com" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The content is the same for both. To get on or off the conversation-list version send email to DigbyZine-request@lists.best.com with the word "subscribe" (to get on the list) or "unsubscribe" (to get off) in the body, but nothing else (except maybe your signature if that's automatic). Then when you get a confirmation message edit the REJECT in the subject line to ACCEPT and send it back. To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I do that one manually. ********************* Late again. The excuse is yet another move (new address on request), hopefully the last for a while. To make a long story short, a rent- mate's plans to buy the house we were in fell through and it was about to be sold out from under us. This time there are no roommates to worry about. The rent is a little more than I'd been paying, but not all that much more. It's not as rural as I would like, but it's close to work and to shopping and such. ********************* Many believe that God does not experience time as we do. Some religions describe God as "eternal and unchanging", which would conflict with God experiencing time along our time dimension. To God, the history of the world would be spread out like one of those timeline diagrams, or maybe, since God is assumed to have some kind of Plan, like a giant project chart in which everyone's every act, for good or ill, is noted. If God experiences subjective duration at all, it would have to be some kind of meta-time, a dimension independent of our time dimension. Perhaps there is something like a parallel-world dimension God knows about but we don't, and to one side of us are worlds worse than ours while on the other side are worlds better than ours. And if God is experiencing time along that dimension and working toward perfection, the better worlds would be "later". That's assuming, of course, that there is that sort of God. ********************* At work I sometimes get to fighting Microsoft Word over things like formatting, and forget what I set out to do. Maybe that's Microsoft's way of keeping down potential competitors? We're not competing against Microsoft, but they have no way of knowing that ... ********************* People have often spoken of different cities as feeling different. In olden times people might have said that different gods ruled different regions, although that explanation is out of fashion nowadays. I'm not very sensitive to such things, although I have now and then felt a sort of mood associated with a place. Silicon Valley seems to be optimistic growth. I'm not sure what Los Angeles was, although it's sort of conventional to say that parts of Hollywood could be disappointment and broken promises for all the people who come and fail to become movie stars. And don't forget all the movie and record deals that fall through. Other parts of the area could well be different. The mood around large employers such as defense plants could be like a roller-coaster ride as the fortunes of that company wax and wane. Nature can also play a part, as can random concentrations of people. This is something to think on some more. ********************* Atomic physicists are exploring ever-higher energies with new accelerators and such, but what of lower energies? There's been some work on slowing down atoms, and they've found some new states like the Bose-Einstein condensate, but I get the feeling that in general low energy isn't as glamorous as high, even if (according to the Big Bang theory) it's a view of our future much as high energy is a view of our past. ********************* "You asked a question whose answer goes without saying, so I didn't think it necessary to reply." ********************* People (especially my parents) have sometimes tried to get me to eat things I didn't like by telling me they tasted better than some other things I did like. That gets me to wondering whether something can be said to taste objectively better than something else. For one example, it's been proven that cilantro tastes different to different people, with the tendency to perceive the taste one way or another being genetic. That leads to questions like whether chocolate "really" tastes better than, say, moose dung. Humans in general may prefer chocolate, but quite a few insects would disagree. And does either taste better than antimatter stellar core material? I think our physical bodies cause us to be too biased to give a good answer. Find an antimatter star whose core is inhabited by some sort of energy beings and you might well end up in a debate as to how good the different substances actually taste. I think what this leads to is that all judgments like "tastes good" or "looks pretty" are subjective, with no real objective standards being possible. ********************* A few weeks back they were hard at work on the house next door to the old place, tearing old roofing off the roof. I assume they followed that up with new roofing, although I suppose it's faintly possible they just left the place roofless, like a big patio or something. But even if the present occupants would rather live in a place open to the sky, perhaps with various people's space marked off by walls, I'm pretty sure they didn't leave it like that. They say homeowners here tend to do a lot of their decorating and remodeling based on resale value, with actually living in the place being secondary. And the demand for roofless patio houses in Silicon Valley is essentially zilch. So the place will almost certainly end up with a roof on it. ********************* Onward. Into, among other things, email. Such is life at the end of the 20th Century. It wasn't like that, at least not with email, at the end of the 19th. And by the end of the 21st we may be past email into something we today wouldn't recognize. But such is life in this general era. Time was, life at the end of the next century could be assumed to be pretty much like life at the end of the current one, and the one before that. But they don't make centuries like they used to. Or something. ********************* Other? Maybe. But let's not go there. That's a figure of speech that seems to have cropped up in the last few years: "Don't go there" meaning "Don't get into that subject area." How did it start? Something in a movie or TV show? Some newspaper column? In any case, it seems to fill a need, so it's catching on. ********************* Cartoon idea: Somebody from a youth culture where caps are worn backward gets a job in a coal mine. But he has problems because he insists on wearing his hat backwards so the light shines toward the back rather than the front. So why did he take the coal-mine job? Because it was the only thing he could get after having had similar problems with a helmet on a previous job involving deep-sea diving. ********************* Before I left for NASFiC I put a joke thing on the board in the lunchroom about ways to store multi-byte numbers in computers. I started with the standard "big endian" (big end of the number first) and "little endian", to which I added "middleian" which put the middle of the number first and "extremist" (maybe should have been "both endian") which put the ends first and the middle last. By the time I got back others had added maybe a dozen new items, some getting away from the constraint of having to represent the number at all. They included "Branch Davidian" which had the number in flames and being shot at by tanks, "Mixolydian" which had musical notes instead of numbers, and others to which Sturgeon's Law applies. People seem to have stopped adding new entries. I wonder how much longer the list will stay up? Probably until people get a little more tired of seeing it and somebody else needs the board. ********************* A string of associations leads to thoughts of two types of earnings: In one, you do something and it earns a certain amount of money, and then you have to keep doing it over and over to get a steady income. One cottage-industry example is spinning and weaving. Once you sell a shirt you have to weave more cloth and make another one, and so on, never ending. Farming is the same: Seedtime and harvest, year after year, you have to do pretty much the same work over and over. The other type is where you set something in motion and it then generates income over a protracted period, often with no defined limit. Write a song or a book, and royalties come in over time, perhaps never ending. In a science fiction story you might build a robot and send it out to work in your place, bringing its paychecks back to you. And so on. Generally the income from one such item won't be enough to live on, but if you do several different ones that are all successful you can pretty much retire. (Even though in many cases you can invest a lump sum now and get an open- ended stream of payments back, I don't think that changes the fundamental distinction. It just creates a gray area between the extremes.) People who speak of the virtues of communities where labor is noble in itself and each person contributes their fair share seem to generally give examples of the first type. Such a community is likely to be visualized as being on a farm, with people plowing and spinning and weaving and such, rather than people sitting around writing songs or computer programs or novels. Is it that the first type is more concrete (a physical product or manual labor you can visualize) while the second is more abstract? Or is the first type somehow more morally virtuous because it involves more "Sweat of your brow"? The second type (creating things and sending them out to continue to earn for you) is a form of capitalism, and thus may actually be evil in some value systems, even if their image of a "capitalist" is closer to an industrial tycoon than a song writer. If small-scale capitalism is as evil as the large-scale variety, then it should still be morally OK for a song writer to write songs and print them up and sell them, since song books are a tangible product that produce one-time income at each sale, and printing is honest labor. But it would not be OK to license the same songs out for others to publish under a royalty arrangement, since then the songs (as distinct from any physical representation thereof) would be a form of capital. Do the people who rail against "capitalism" think of intellectual property in these terms? ********************* A few days ago we had an unusual (for this area) lightning storm. That reminds me of this: Weather Music Nobody really CARED about the weather in Sector 47 Forty miles from nowhere In an obscure corner of the Empire But the Law was the Law So they had a Weather Control Station Anyway. Now the weather was supposed to be managed "For the benefit of the People" But since the only people in the Sector were the station crew They did pretty much as they pleased. For instance, They had friends who were musicians in the city And who would come in once or twice a month to visit And have jam sessions. I was at one once -- It started out fairly normal, Just people making music. But along toward midnight As things were building They joined in with the elements: At first with simple things like moaning wind For a song about the desert Or gentle steady rain For a ballad of aching loneliness. Then, to a pounding rock beat, the climax -- Hard driving rain, even a little hail, Howling feedback and screaming wind, Crashing chords mixed with thunder and lightning (With the thunder right on the beat) Giving way at last To silence And moonlight. Thomas G. Digby written 0315 hr 10/27/74 entered 2220 hr 4/12/92 -- END --