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/~bubbles/ Issue #67 New Moon of July 1, 2000 Contents copyright 2000 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 (****). 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I do that one manually. ********************* At work I got to thinking on how out of several dozen programmers in the company I'm one of only a handful who deals directly with board-level hardware, the kind of thing where writing to some location changes a voltage or turns on an LED or something of that sort. The others deal in higher-level abstractions and many of them have never touched an oscilloscope. As a result, when people start talking shop at lunch I often have little to add to the conversation and thus often end up at (or perhaps defining) the "Cootie Table". That got me to thinking: A world in a computer, basically a big simulation of people and their environment, is a science fiction cliche. I'm wondering if people in such a world, assuming they know the true situation, might develop a taboo against talking about low-level operating-system functions and the like, much as we have taboos against discussing certain bodily fluids and functions. Of course there would be people whose jobs require working with the operating system and physical RAM and hardware addresses and such, much as there are people in our world who do abdominal surgery or autopsies or run lab tests on urine specimens and the like. It's just that there, like here, such people will be limited as to the degree of detail in which they can discuss their work in ordinary mixed company. ********************* A few weeks back NASA dumped a scientific satellite that had lost part of its guidance system and was deemed to be in danger of eventually falling in a populated area. They basically lowered the orbit until it re- entered over an area of ocean where the chances of fragments hitting anybody were minimal. This got me to thinking semi-poetic thoughts. I'm pretty sure its computers weren't advanced enough to care about their fate, but I still find myself imagining that satellite asking the controllers, "Will I dream?" ********************* Recently I've been watching a TV show called "Poltergeist: The Legacy". It's on late Sunday nights, at least in the Bay Area. The premise is that supernatural things like ghosts and demons are real, and that there's a secret society of various Good clerics and/or magic- users who, unbeknownst to the rest of us, protect the world from Evil. This society is called "The Legacy". I don't know where the poltergeist part comes in. In a recent episode it was revealed that there was a portal to Hell in the San Francisco area, and that the local Legacy House (Legacy Society HQ, one of several around the world) was built over that portal. The present house was built right after the 1906 quake, and the local branch of the society has been based there ever since. They also mention a legend about a similar portal in Byzantium that threatened to open at the end of the First Millennium. Supposedly the Legacy society existed even then, and collaborated with the Rosicrucians to handle that particular threat. They didn't say whether the various portals were eternal, or whether they came and went. If they've always been there, what was the state of the San Francisco portal a thousand years ago? Did various Native American medicine men or wise women or what-have-you keep the portal shut until Europeans came and converted the demons to Christianity? Did Christian clerics somehow make their way there, perhaps by way of Asia, five hundred years before Columbus? Or did the demons have free rein to wreak havoc until the Spanish came and "saved" the local tribes? In the TV show (and in quite a few movies with similar themes) it's hinted or said that if a portal ever opens fully, evil will be able to take over the world. But can that be? It seems to me that there are too many places such a portal can exist without being known to those whose job it is to keep them closed. Now what if such portals exist, but are limited in the amount of traffic they can carry? Open one, and Evil may come to rule a sizable chunk of the surrounding territory, but can't expand much beyond a local region. That might explain various especially bloody episodes of history. For example, what if a portal had opened somewhere in the middle of Europe in the mid-1930's and finally got closed around 1944? Imagine the movie that would make: A band of Good magic-users and clerics infiltrate deep into Axis territory during WWII to find and close the portal, after which evil in the area would sort of run out of steam, allowing the Allies to win the war. In that scenario there might be additional portals in Russia and maybe China, perhaps with somewhat different characteristics leading to the Cold War instead of WWIII. It's something to think about. ********************* Just before the Fourth I asked a couple of restaurants I frequent if they would be open. Not much unusual there, since I do that before many major holidays. But this time I somehow got a mental image of someone with a time machine coming into some store or restaurant the day after some big holiday and asking if they'd been open. ********************* I was thinking about a comic strip that had a street named "Timid Deer Lane" which got me to thinking about how other animals think. Humans, or at least some humans, seem to be naturally curious. Put something novel in the environment and many will attempt to investigate it. But other species (not necessarily intelligent) may have no real curiosity at all, and see anything novel as a threat. So if, for example, there's a table in the lunchroom with a stack of stuff covered by a sheet with a sign about how it is to be unveiled at the next meeting, a human might be tempted to peek while someone from a non-curious novelty-as-threat species would be more likely to avoid getting close, and might perhaps even skip the upcoming meeting. And there might be still other species with no emotional response either way. This assumes that a species devoid of curiosity can evolve intelligence. That's data we don't currently have. ********************* A joke I saw on the Internet got me to thinking about humor again: Bill and Hillary had Al and Tipper over for dinner at the White house. In the middle of dinner Al excused himself to use the bathroom. After a couple of minutes he came back. They finished dinner and left. On the way home Al turned to Tipper and said, "Did you know Bill has got a solid gold urinal in his bathroom? How can we tell the American people we are serious about cutting the budget when the President has a solid gold urinal?" Tipper said, "There must be some mistake, I'll call Hillary when we get home and find out." They get home and she calls Hillary and says, "Is it true that Bill has a solid gold urinal in his bathroom?" Hillary put her hand over the receiver and says, "Bill, I just found out who peed in your saxophone! I think this is funny partly because it breaks assumptions. Some jokes are outlandish enough from the start that you know you have to suspend disbelief no matter what: "Two carrots and an alarm clock walk into a bar ...." Others are set pretty much in the Real World all the way through. But this one starts out real and then turns unlikely right at the punch line. That makes it fair game for logical dissection. First, how many people keep saxophones in their bathrooms? I suppose you could play it in the shower instead of singing, but there are practical problems. Even if advances in plastics technology have gotten rid of the traditional leather valve pads so it won't hurt the instrument to get it wet, the shape of a sax is such that it would tend to collect water. That could affect the sound, at least on the lower notes. But OK, let's ignore that problem and just accept for purposes of the joke that Bill Clinton keeps a saxophone in his bathroom. Maybe the rest of the household won't let him play it anywhere else. Other questions still remain. How many bathrooms does the White House have? Would the one Bill Clinton would keep a saxophone in be the same as the one dinner guests would use? Then there the matter of mistaking the sax for a urinal. To me they don't look much alike, but then I haven't traveled all that widely. There may be parts of the world where urinals look just like saxophones. For all I know some manufacturers of saxophones may even use the rejects in their restrooms. It should also be noted that many upper-class meals include wine. That could have been a factor, although I would think you'd have to drink a lot of wine to mistake a saxophone for a urinal. He also seems to have mistaken the brass saxes are usually made of for solid gold. Compared to the rest, that's not a biggie. Let it go. If you can mistake a saxophone for a urinal, you can certainly mistake brass for gold. And maybe the sax was gold-plated or something. But then comes the secondary punch: There's this man peeing into a saxophone he's mistaken for a urinal. Now saxes have lots of "controls" all over them, so you can picture him standing there afterward wondering, "How the heck do you flush this thing?" ********************* I can't give details, but work has been busy to the extent of basically not having a weekend at all for the past ten days or so (although we did get July 4th off in a last-minute management decision). Why do we put up with this? I think part of it is that we're getting paid to do the same sort of stuff many of us would be doing for a hobby anyway. And that leads into this issue's poem. ********************* Problems My friend had been sort of wilting lately, Turning pale and faded and a little blurry around the edges. Regular doctors saw nothing in particular wrong, So I took him to the local guru. "Needs problems," said the guru with only a quick glance. "Of course he has problems," I replied, "That's why I brought him to you." "I didn't say he HAS problems. I said he NEEDS problems. His problem is that he doesn't have problems, And not having problems can be a very serious problem." "Huh?" say I, and he explains again. After a few more rounds it sinks in: Man is a problem-solving creature, Evolved, or created, or whatever, to solve problems, And a problem-solver without problems is nothing. Some instinctively know this, As sales of puzzles show. But others need to have problems thrust upon them. "You mean I should let the air out of his tires, Hide his morning paper in the bushes, Or invent foolish errands for him to run? Or should I get more serious, Hinting of rumors of downsizing at work, And asking his landlord to make noises about eviction?" "Professional opinions among gurus differ, But even if threatening problems are better than none at all, I'd try happy problems first." Happy problems? Those are the ones we face gladly, Like a painter needing to choose colors for a sunset Because she chose to try to capture it on canvas. Or being out on the lake in a boat with your fishing pole, Wondering exactly where they'll be biting And how to sneak up on them without scaring them off. Some, like scientists, get paid to solve happy problems. Others must seek problems elsewhere. But they're easy to find. Was there something my friend could do to help his other friends? Some way he could contribute to making a better world? Or even something as trivial As suggesting a closing line for this poem? The prognosis looks quite good. -- Thomas G. Digby written 19:00 03/15/1995 -- END --