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 #201 New Moon of May 2, 2011 Contents copyright 2011 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. ********************* It's May again. It's the month with the shortest name, at least in English. Have you ever noticed that there seems to be a season of months with short names, and a season of months with long names? You have five consecutive months with names shorter than six letters, then one month whose name is exactly six letters long, followed by six months in a row with names longer than six letters. I don't think anybody consciously planned it that way, as in "It's kind of warm this time of year, so let's not keep the scribes all cooped up in that stuffy old copying room copying long names of months. Let's have some months with short names for a while. They can get back to long month names in the fall." It just sort of happened. May is also the first month that doesn't have an R in it. Those used to be months you shouldn't eat oysters, but I haven't heard much of that kind of talk lately. But then few of the people I hang out with are big on eating oysters, at least when I'm around, so maybe I just haven't been noticing. ********************* There was an editorial in the local paper recently about how American labor unions invented May Day. The item went on and on about political stuff, but never once mentioned Maypoles and flowers and the kinds of outdoor fun and frolic that I associate with May Day. In the sense I'm used to thinking of I don't think any one person or group "invented" May Day. It's been going on for ages, with little bits added and lost and changed over the centuries. So aren't the labor-union people at least sort of aware that there's other stuff going on around the beginning of May besides politics? ********************* May Day is one of those times Pagans tend to speak of "The Wheel of the Year". I see that term fairly often. But how come one never sees anything about "The Tire of the Year" or "The Brake Drum of the Year" or whatever? As the Wheel of the Year turns, the Tire of the Year, possibly in conjunction with the Shock Absorbers of the Year, might soften the effects of the random bumps we all seem to experience now and then. And the Brakes of the Year might come in handy when too much stuff seems to be coming along in rapid succession. What other car parts of the year might these analogies be stretched to before they get too silly? And who is to say what the limits of allowable silliness are? ********************* Recently the judge who wrote the opinion to the effect that the California ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional has come out as gay, and also revealed that he is in a long-term relationship. Now people are saying that this is a potential source of bias, and that he should have recused himself from the case. Others are saying that a heterosexual judge would have potentially been biased the other way. So given those arguments, how do we get an unbiased decision? I personally suspect that many people of whatever sexual orientation don't feel strongly that they would be personally affected either way by allowing or not allowing same-sex marriage, and thus would be able to render an unbiased opinion. But I can also see this as being such a deeply personal issue that it may be almost impossible to verify the impartiality of any particular judge. So how about robot judges? Yes, it's possible to program a robot to be biased, just as it's possible to rig an electronic voting machine. But if their programming is all open source it can, at least in theory, be checked for that kind of thing. Whether it would be practical for any bunch of humans, however smart and well-informed, to check the programming of a robot judge is kind of doubtful. One might suggest building a robot to check the first robot's programming, but that way lies infinite recursive madness. Of course this idea has probably already been used in some science fiction story or other. Science fiction is like that. ********************* There was something in the news lately about another big-name sports player getting arrested for assault or something. It seems like I've heard of quite a few such cases over the years. Is it just coincidence or media bias, or is there something to it? Is success at certain sports, such as football and basketball and hockey, correlated with a tendency to get arrested for certain violent crimes? In the sports I'm thinking of, players often have to make split-second decisions. And the action often gets rough. So might the kind of impulsiveness that can land someone in jail for assault or the like also make them better at fast-paced potentially violent sports? ********************* "The US military buried Osama bin Laden at sea so terrorists wouldn't be able to use bits of the body as holy relics or shrines or the like to inspire more terrorism." "But couldn't the terrorists just do a Google search for him?" "They didn't have Goggle Sea Floor back then. And even when beta versions did first start coming out they didn't have visual pattern indexing. You would have had to search the region you thought the body had landed in manually." "Oh." ********************* In the lobby of a movie theater a few weeks ago was a promotional display consisting of a giant cardboard hammer with an inscription something like "Whoever holds this hammer will, if worthy, hold the power of the gods." It didn't say anything about what happens if the holder is not worthy. Does the unworthy holder get struck down with lightning? Or do they just stand there looking silly, while the gods sit around and laugh at them the way we laugh at those pictures that you often see on the Internet of kittens trying to do human-type things? That got me to thinking of my own version of how the story might go, irrespective of the "official" version in whatever movie the thing was advertising (probably "Thor"). Suppose there's an ancient stone circle on the outskirts of some college town. In the center of the circle there's a stone altar and on the altar there's a hammer. And somewhere on or near all of this is this inscription: "Whoever holds this hammer will, if worthy, hold the power of the gods. Whoever is unworthy will look awfully silly." It has become traditional as part of fraternity initiations and such, or sometimes just plain bullying, for people to be brought into the circle and made to hold the hammer while their tormentors laugh at how silly they look. (You may wonder why the hammer has never been stolen. There are other inscriptions around the edge of the circle, sort of like those signs about not taking shopping carts out of the parking lot, warning of all sorts of dire consequences awaiting whoever tries to steal the hammer. Rumor has it that people who have tried to steal it anyway have found out that the warnings have some validity.) This is all leading up to the time when one rather nerdy young man or woman who had been getting picked on a lot is brought into the circle and made to pick up the hammer. Nothing happens. Nobody laughs. Somehow this person doesn't seem to look silly at all. If anything, people are starting to feel compassion for them. Nobody is quite sure what they'd been expecting, but this isn't it. So they trudge back to their rooms. The hammer-holder, who doesn't really believe in all that mumbo-jumbo, feels a strange sense of relief. Everybody else is just sort of disappointed, and more or less forgets the whole thing. But there is some lasting effect. The person who hadn't looked silly holding the hammer slowly gains courage and self-confidence, and wisdom to go along with all the nerdy knowledge of facts and figures they'd always had. And as their long-time interest in science fiction starts branching out into fantasy they grow less skeptical about the possible existence of magic. This is not the only person who has held the hammer and not looked silly. Over time they meet one another, share their stories, and become friends. And strange things begin to happen. Driven by feelings they can't explain, they now and then make their way alone into the stone circle and just stand there holding the hammer for a while. Then they put it down and go back home. And then they dream. One person doing graduate work in biochemistry gets an idea that leads to a promising new treatment for a hitherto incurable malady. Another is inspired to write a song that helps get a "green" candidate elected to office. A third starts noticing clues that others had missed, thus uncovering a major scandal involving some large corporation. And so on. Nobody ever goes out swinging the hammer around and bashing monsters and triggering apocalyptic special-effects orgies, but overall they probably do at least as much total good for the world as most monster-bashers ever accomplish. So might this make a good movie? It wouldn't appeal to those who get off on violence and special effects and such, but might do well with those who are more into character development. ********************* Recently I was watching a presentation on computer stuff. One slide had a number of words in parentheses. But when the speaker had to refer to them, he talked about words in "round brackets". And that wasn't the first time I'd heard parentheses referred to that way. So what's going on here? Has someone decided that "parenthesis" is too big a word to teach kids in school? Or is it too complicated a word for tech support people in strange exotic lands to try to say to the less literate of their American callers? Or is there some other explanation? And what are people calling related symbols nowadays? I seem to think of them as (parentheses) and [square brackets] and {curly braces}. And there are also , also known as "less than" or "greater than" if the small end is pointing to the left or right respectively. So what do you call these things, and do others around you refer to them differently? ********************* Recent news events, as well as some of the public reaction to them, remind me of this: Lessons in Pain When the evil ruler arrives in the Martyr's Paradise May he begin to learn. May the maidens who serve his carnal desires Begin to arouse deeper feelings. Little by little, over eons of eternity, May he learn to share his soul. Then once he has learned love, Let him learn pain: Beyond the physical pain of fire or falling buildings, Let him know the cutting short of hopes and dreams, The desperation of having to choose one death over another, The fallen comrades and the empty firehouse, The child whose parents will never return, And the emptiness of the hole in the heart when a loved one's fate is simply Unknown. Let every death that has brought him joy Now bring its full measure of sorrow. And then ... Knowing that whatever we ask for others we also ask for ourselves, And that I too have caused my share of pain, Once we have known the pain we have caused, Let the gods be merciful. -- Tom Digby Written 18:16 12/19/2001 ********************* 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. 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 --