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 #208 New Moon of November 24, 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. ********************* As this issue falls right around Thanksgiving, I'm reminded that one of my earliest childhood memories was related to that holiday. This may have been when I was four years old, almost five, although it could have been the following year. One of my household duties was to set the table for family meals. As I was starting to set the table for breakfast Dad said that it was Thanksgiving, which was a day when we would be eating a lot. So I just sort of assumed that if we were going to be eating a lot we would need lots of silverware, and started putting extra forks and spoons and maybe knives at each place. Then Dad said that wouldn't be necessary, because the extra eating would come later in the day, not at breakfast. I have other memories that may be of the actual dinner. They're only fragments, and could be from some other occasion. I think I remember turkey and gravy, but I'm not positive of that. Again, I could be mixing memories of other feasts. And I don't recall if we did any sort of ritual such as saying what we were thankful for. If I'm correct about what year it was there was a war on, and we would probably have been thankful that Dad was stationed locally and not halfway around the world getting shot at. But I don't remember either way. Although some say they don't recall any memories from when they were that young, I have some I can put fairly definite dates on. My sister was born a week before my fifth birthday, and I remember Mom being brought home from the hospital. I also recall seeing Mom knitting little socks and such. When I asked why, I was told we were expecting another child soon. Since our birthdays were right around the end of the year it seems plausible that I could also remember that Thanksgiving. ********************* Mention of Thanksgiving also reminds me of how when I was a child my parents did the thing of pulling the wishbone (aka "pulley bone") whenever we had turkey for dinner. We also did it for chicken. If you're not familiar with this, Wikipedia calls it a "Furcula". As you may know, this is a Y-shaped bone found in the breast area of birds. The custom is for two people to take hold of the two ends of the bone, make a wish, and pull the bone apart. Because of its shape it will break into two unequal pieces. Supposedly the person who ends up with the larger piece will get their wish. But nowadays much pre-cut chicken comes with the wishbone already cut in two, with part of it in each breast piece. So if you're at some place like KFC you won't be able to do the make-a-wish thing. Is this another American folk tradition being wiped out by commercialism and processed foods? ********************* Is it cheating to play "Flight of the Bumblebee" on a theremin where you can do simple glissandos instead of all that fast chromatic-scale stuff you have to do on a piano? ********************* Someone mentioned the Snow White story during a break in a discussion of technological stuff. That led me to thoughts that maybe the Magic Mirror the Wicked Witch kept asking "Who is the fairest of them all?" might have been some kind of wall-mounted flat-screen computer thing. After all, we're getting close to being able to do it. We may already be there. Start with one of those large flat TV screens, but mounted with the long axis vertical ("portrait mode"). Put a bunch of cameras along the edges, or maybe put one behind a teeny tiny hole somewhere in the middle so it can get a view closely approximating what you get with a real mirror. Flip the image horizontally and orient it so it's upright with the screen in portrait mode. Feed that to the screen and you have something like the traditional full-length mirror. But you can do lots of other stuff with it. For example, if you don't like the way traditional mirrors reverse everything left-to-right, you can have it flip the image about some other axis, or not flip it at all. If you have additional cameras mounted elsewhere nearby you can get a back or side view without having to mess around with multiple mirrors. If you're on your way out somewhere and you're uncertain as to whether you need a sweater or jacket or something, you can have the "mirror" give you a weather report. Future versions might even be able to do pattern recognition on what you're wearing and suggest alternatives if you don't seem to be suitably dressed for conditions outside. This is in addition to other computer-type stuff like news and traffic reports and maps of how to get there. With speech recognition technology you could ask it questions. These could range from the mundane, such as keeping track of what cosmetics you have in stock and whether you need to have it order more, to potentially delicate subjective matters such as whether a given garment makes you look fat. Given a good enough data base setup and face-recognition technology, you might even try to ask it who's the most beautiful person in the land. Then if the mirror says that someone other than you is the fairest of them all, you can have it show you recipes for poison apples or whatever. This started out as idle speculation, but it might actually have potential. The only parts we may not be close to being able to do are the judgement calls about the user's looks. ********************* "That store has had a big problem with people stealing invisibility cloaks. A thief would try one on, and then just walk out without paying. Since they're invisible the staff can't see them, and they don't show up in the security camera footage ..." ********************* Various news items about Black Friday shopping madness have led to thoughts of a game. You start out in front of a giant multi-level shopping mall with an empty cart, a shopping list, and a credit card. Your mission is to buy everything on the list with the money available on the card. The main complication is that the mall is jam-packed with other holiday shoppers, not all of whom are well-mannered and not all of whom are sane. The first level is easy. It is possible to complete it without using any weapons, although pepper spray can make it easier. Then as you ascend the escalators to the higher levels things get more difficult and more chaotic. And you may start running into monsters and magic-users. In addition to stores selling the items on your list, there are places selling weapons, armor, camping supplies, and other stuff, including useless junk. You'll need some of this for the higher levels. But don't be too tempted to splurge. There's enough money in your card for everything you'll need, perhaps with some margin for error. But there's not enough to go hog-wild with. And even if your cart is a magical Cart of Holding, too much useless dead weight may slow you down at a critical moment. So you have to make wise decisions. HINT: Some merchants will ship large items to your home, so you don't have to carry them around as you continue shopping. That also reduces the risk of people stealing stuff out of your cart. I don't know if there's anything on the market like that now. But I suspect there will be by the time next year's holiday shopping season rolls around. ********************* Back on that pepper-spray incident at the UC Davis "Occupy" thing, a newspaper columnist said the officer's body language was like he was "spraying for weeds." In other words, the supposedly "official" criteria about "self-defense" or "protection of self or others" didn't seem to enter into it. But on second thought, if modern humans originated in Africa, then they are an exotic invasive species in California, and spraying to get rid of them is legitimate. I think many would agree that most California ecosystems would be better off without humans, at least if you define the absence of human influence as "good". So in that sense Officer Pike was doing the right thing. The only problem is that he wasn't doing enough. What they really need to do is scatter radioactive dust for miles all around, as happened by accident at Chernobyl. That will run those pesky humans out. Then the area can be left to gradually return to its natural state. So do we need an UnOccupy the Environment movement? ********************* As I'm starting to write this, we just had one sunny day after a couple of days of rain. And as I was out walking in the sunshine I was noticing that even though it was nearing the middle of the day, the sun was low in the sky, casting the kinds of long shadows I tend to associate with late afternoons. This all-day late-afternoon feeling will be here for the next couple of months, until sometime around Groundhog Day. There's no definite ending date, like a Solstice or Equinox or anything. I'll just sort of start to notice that the shadowy feeling is ending, perhaps on the first sunny day after a few days of clouds. Or maybe it will be when Daylight Saving comes back, although I doubt it'll be that late in the season. It seems to vary from year to year. ********************* Long Shadows Long shadows on a warm afternoon. The slanting rays are a bridge to other days, other seasons, other lives. My head lies clear across the courtyard. Others hurry through my shade, oblivious. Long warm shadows do not concern them now. They will not walk the sun-ray bridge today. My bridge leads back to a magic childhood moment: Friends running across a green lawn, Amazed by the shadows stretching before us. Innocent of geometry and angles and other book-learning, We had never known our shadows could grow like that. I do not recall how that magic afternoon ended: Dinner? A fairy story lovingly read to me? Bedtime? The bridge to warm afternoons does not extend into the dark of night. Long shadows on a warm afternoon. The slanting rays of a long-ago Christmas Eve, not warm, but still magic. I see the fading sunlight on a wall Glowing with anticipation of the delights to come with the dawn. I can hardly wait for bedtime. Long shadows on a warm afternoon. At last the ray-bridge brings me back to the here and now. As I walk homeward I catch a last glimpse of the sun touching the horizon. Shadows have faded, But I can still imagine mine, Stretching now to the edge of the world. Long shadows on a warm afternoon. -- Thomas G. Digby First Draft 19:50 04/22/2002 Edited 20:33 05/05/2002 Edited 13:34 05/11/2002 Edited 15:39 06/19/2002 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. 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