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 #193 New Moon of September 8, 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. ********************* Here we are in September, kind of a No-Nonsense month. It feels like summer playtime is pretty much over, even if the official Equinox hasn't happened yet. The swimming pool at a nearby park is closing. Amusement parks that do their biggest business during summer vacation are starting to wind down for the year. Tourists with school-age children are heading back home as the new academic year gets underway. Meanwhile a local poetry-reading group has just had its first reading after their summer hiatus. Other institutions such as galleries and museums are also starting up again. When you consider schools and other cultural activities Fall becomes a time of new beginnings, even if the growing season for farm crops and the wild things in the forests and meadows is coming to a close. ********************* With the start of the new academic year, the Starbucks next to Stanford University will probably be more crowded. I'll find out the next time my monthly dinner group goes there for dessert. Sort of related, there have been items in the paper about some coffee houses cutting back on Internet service because people with laptops just sit there all day nursing one drink while other customers can't find seats. A thought: Put parking meters (like you see on city streets) at the tables. Don't worry about how much stuff people sitting at the tables do or don't order as long as they keep the meters fed. Then lower the food and drink prices. In other words, separate paying for food or paying for an Internet connection from paying for a place to sit. If all the prices (meter rates as well as food prices) are set right, this should lead to more overall profit. Customers may grump, but that should subside after a while. After all, those who finish their coffee or whatever quickly, or get it to go, will be paying less under this system than before. ********************* Someone on the WELL posted a photo of an intersection where the people installing stop signs stenciled the letters onto the pavement in the wrong order so they spelled STPO instead of STOP. That reminded me that I'd previously seen SOTP but not STPO. So I started thinking. There are 24 ways to arrange four letters, assuming each letter is used once and only once: STOP STPO SPOT SPTO SOTP SOPT TOPS TOSP TSOP TSPO TPOS TPSO OPST OPTS OTSP OTPS OSPT OSTP PSTO PSOT POST POTS PTSO PTOS This assumption should hold if there is one stencil for each letter, and they put them all down before applying the paint so no letter can appear twice. I'm also assuming they get all the letters right-side up and don't get any backwards. I'm guessing the first letter is the one least likely to be wrong, because it would be most likely to be noticed. Likewise, I would think getting the last letter wrong would be a little more obvious than swapping the middle two because it makes more of a change to the overall outline of the word. But if STPO does indeed show up now and then, that assumption may not be valid. Also, errors that make another word like SPOT may be more likely to be caught quickly and will thus be rare. So I would predict more SOTP than anything else (other than STOP). Which ones have you seen or not seen? ********************* There's also the question of whether a ticket for failing to stop at a SOTP sign would be legally valid. I would think it would be, on the basis that a reasonable person should know what was intended, even if some of the details are wrong. Besides, there's likely to be another sign on a pole or something next to the intersection. Stop signs are generally pre-manufactured, and thus almost certain to be spelled correctly. Then again, some jurisdictions may work on the basis that a defect in a legal notice renders it null and void. If that's the case, you may get away with not stopping at such an intersection. But then what do you do if you get a ticket for failure to sotp? ********************* More on pavement markings, this one triggered by a recent cartoon on the Web: http://www.xkcd.com/781/ It's a commentary on the common practice of laying out pavement markings to be read bottom-up, as in AHEAD STOP Sometimes that format makes sense, if the lines of text are fairly far apart and there's likely to be a vehicle close enough in front of you that you can see only one line at a time. Then it works sort of like a scrolling message sign. But other times it doesn't. Sometimes the lines are so close together that you read the whole thing all in one glance and then have to mentally rearrange it to figure out what it means. Of course most of the time it doesn't really matter, because the message is only a couple of words long and there are only a few more or less standard ones. So drivers just sort of memorize them and don't really have to go through the mental calculations each time they see one. But it does remind me of one I saw in Florida many years ago: LANE TURN LEFT on a left-turn lane. It looked to me like something a military drill sergeant might shout to a bunch of drivers in some sort of synchronized-driving exercise: "LANE, turn LEFT!" ********************* Someone at a party was telling me about a former girlfriend who, among other problems, had gotten hooked on meth. Too bad it wasn't math instead. He said he could have lived with that, maybe even been happy with it. Likewise if she'd become an entomologist specializing in the moth. Or maybe she could have gotten into myth. Of all the available vowels for "m_th" she picked the worst one, at least as far as we knew. It's possible that "mith" and "muth" would have been worse, but I can't really say because I don't know what those are, if anything. It just occurred to me that she could have taken up dentistry or some other medical stuff having to do with the mouth, if you consider "ou" to be a single vowel. Or would that have been cheating? ********************* For another thing about how people seem to perceive language, let's go back to that cartoon site, this time to http://www.xkcd.com/783/ It's about people who seem to hear "What's the address?" as "How do you get there?" and insist on giving driving directions instead of telling me where the place is. That's long been one of my pet peeves as well. Why do they do that? Do they not really hear what's being said? Does some subconscious process translate the query before their conscious mind gets hold of it? In the cartoon, the person giving the directions evidently knows on some level that the address is being asked for, but still insists on giving directions instead, perhaps because that's more "helpful" or something. So has anyone ever really studied this? ********************* East Plergbistan's attempts to set up a non-denominational Church of Official Religion may be running into problems with hymnals, according to some of the bureaucrats in charge. Most of the rank and file members seem to be OK with the situation. When the predecessor groups merged, they brought all the hymnals they'd been using to the new common meeting place. A few individual members may have brought their own song books as well. All these books were placed more or less randomly in the hymnal racks on the backs of the pews. So when the minister/rabbi/imam/priest/whatever whose turn it is to lead the service says something like "We will now sing Hymn number 85", everybody grabs a book, opens it to number 85, and sings whatever number 85 in that book is. This can be a problem because the various books don't agree on what song is at which number. For example, in one book number 85 may be "Onward Christian Soldiers" while in another it might be "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" or maybe the Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows". That's if your book even has a song number 85. If it's something like _Fifty Greatest Hits of the 1930's_, or maybe a sci-fi novel or something, you're pretty much out of luck. Naturally there's a bit of gamesmanship going on. Leaders from those sects that had thick hymnals tend to pick high numbers, up around three or four hundred, so as to silence the fringe elements whose books tend to be less voluminous. If, on the other hand, that day's leader came from a group with a thin book they'll pick low numbers so as to be more inclusive, even if it means less unanimity. And much hinges on the organist, since the organ can pretty much drown out everybody else. Some organists are willing to play from the leader's hymnal, especially if they have some say in choosing the songs, while others insist on bringing their own. Opinions among church members members differ. Some favor an amendment requiring the organist to play from whatever book the leader of that day's service specifies, while others view the present system in terms of checks and balances and thus tend to resist change. Still others are seeking to influence things by donating hymnals to the group. This is not likely to be resolved any time soon, although some predict a gradual consolidation of power as some of the smaller factions lose members through random attrition. This doesn't seem to bother the bureaucrats in charge all that much. As long as they get their percentage of the weekly collection and can tell their superiors that every local citizen is present for roll call they don't care about the nitpicky details. ********************* Since I was mentioning parking meters earlier ... Meter Madness One morning recently on the way to work I encountered a crew cutting little holes in the sidewalk and planting parking meters. That brought back memories from high school days of a summer job on the parking meter farm tending cuttings while they took root and grew to the proper size for the streets. Cuttings? Yes, you could grow them from seed but they might not breed true. They pick up pollen from wild strains or even now and then mutate to offer sixty-two thousand years for a quarter or else maybe fourteen point three nanoseconds for some coin not yet invented. With cuttings you know what you're getting and besides, most varieties are seedless to allow no chance for a half-forgotten meter on some deserted side street to go to seed, scattering to the wind to sprout in the most awkward places. Few things can match the fury of some quiet suburban homeowner finding his lawn infested with parking meters, not to mention the possibilities of interbreeding with fire hydrants, street lights, and newspaper vending machines. So now they use the seedless types and give them anti-growth hormones so they won't get too tall and the roots won't invade the sewers. Like, how would you like to get up in the night for a call of nature only to find, emerging straight and proud from the toilet bowl: "TIME EXPIRED"? I hear it used to happen and that's how they got the idea for the pay toilet. But that's another story, along with the rumors that they're working on new breeds for the indoor potted-plant market to replace African violets and cacti and catnip and even hanging plants (by crossing them with Salvador Dali's watches). That sounds kind of interesting, as long as no one comes around to give out tickets. Thomas G. Digby written 0440 hr 1/29/79 typed 0345 hr 3/25/79 entered 2325 hr 3/16/92 format 13:19 12/22/2001 ********************* 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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