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 #238 New Moon of April 28, 2014 Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. See the Creative Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* So here we are with tax season over (at least in the US) and spring well on its way to becoming summer, and we have more fiftieth anniversaries of things that helped make our society what it is today. Fifty years ago, give or take a few weeks, the Rolling Stones released their first album. People marched and demonstrated and counter- demonstrated for and against various causes in various places, sometimes peacefully, sometimes violently. Young men started burning draft cards. And the computer language BASIC made its first appearance. I was a bit surprised to find that last item. It was longer ago than I'd thought it was, and while it was happening I hadn't noticed it, probably because back then people just didn't have computers of their very own at home. Computers were mysterious things found only in a handful of corporate offices or big-name colleges. Only a few people had access to them. I knew a little about them because the college I'd been to had one, but I didn't expect them to become what they are today. So what new thing is sitting quietly in the shadows today, destined to remake our world two or three decades from now? ********************* All through the 1950's the school I attended somehow managed to not do a Maypole thing on May Day. I recall kind of missing it and hoping they would do it some year, but they never did. One year they tried, but got rained out. Other years I don't think they even did that much. I suspect part of it may have been that May Day had become political, what with workers' groups using it to do rallies and demonstrations while the Soviets showed off their military might with big parades of troops and such. So we came up with patriotic alternatives, such as "Law Day". These may have been more "American" than what people were doing elsewhere, but they were also kind of dull in comparison to traditional May Day. But now traditional May Day seems to be making a comeback, unencumbered by patriotic stuff and military parades and political rallies. So now we get to do Maypoles again. ********************* Another event that's over for another year is Easter. I trust that those of you who hid Easter eggs got permission from whoever was in charge of whatever venue you hid them in. And I also trust that you were diligent about gathering up any unfound eggs if your agreement with the venue specified that you should do so. Unless, of course, having the last remaining eggs gradually become harder to ignore over the course of several weeks is part of the game. ********************* In recent months I've been browsing through an old (1946 publication date) book of science fiction stories. In one of the stories a person from another planet says that their civilization is forty thousand years ahead of Earth's. That reminded me that it was fairly common in science fiction of years past for someone to take a quick look at another civilization and immediately estimate that they are X number of years ahead of or behind us. X was usually several hundred years, and was pretty much always a single simple number. You almost never heard of some other culture being ahead of us in some areas but behind us in others. I think assumptions about such things are different today. Another bit of differing assumptions: People on this other world have common ancestry with Earth humans, and have decided that they need to bring in some Earth human genetic material to revitalize their race. So far, so good, if you take the premise that they're close enough to Earth humans genetically for this to work. So there's this whole big plot about bringing an Earth human to their planet to live and mate with their females. Since physical appearance and standards of beauty differ, they use mind-control rays or some such to make them want to actually do the coupling. Wouldn't it have been easier to collect semen samples on Earth and bring just the samples (as opposed to the whole living person) back to their planet and do artificial insemination? Of course then there wouldn't have been any story about the Earth human escaping and being hunted down by the aliens. There's a lot more plot stuff I've left out, but I don't have any major thoughts on it right now. (The story is "A Matter of Size" by Harry Bates. The book is ADVENTURES IN TIME AND SPACE from Random House.) ********************* That book also has some stories about time travel, and I'm reminded that in many of those stories time travelers tend to do so on the sly. They act as if their presence is not really legal, and the authorities would do unpleasant things to them if they were discovered. That brings up the question of the legal status of time travelers. If you travel into the past or future of whatever country you're a citizen of, are you there legally? Do we know of any countries that have anything in their laws regarding time travelers from other eras? Does it depend on what country you're from? If you started from a place that was never part of the country you're visiting and never will be, then the laws about coming in from foreign countries may apply. But what if you're coming from the past or future of the country you're going to? Does it make a difference whether you've gone back to before your country was founded or forward to after it's taken over by someone else? Does it affect your citizenship status if you go back to before you were born or forward to after your death? Is it illegal for more than one of you to be in the same jurisdiction at the same time? What happens if some time traveler gets involved in litigation and introduces the court's eventual ruling in the case as evidence? This brings up the whole area of time travelers going into the past and doing stuff that didn't happen. It can get messy. I suspect governments and courts of law will not handle time travel paradoxes well. ********************* Today's (May 4, 2014) LuAnn comic strip had a flashback to April 20, 1986. Two nitpicks: First, 1986 was 28 years ago. That means the main characters have been in school for at least 28 years even though they are only just now about to graduate from high school. Although the characters have never been aging at the same rate as the readers, acknowledging that fact this explicitly is kind of unusual. Second, April 20, 1986 was a Sunday. The flashback shows them in class with the teacher announcing a field trip. So did they have school on Sundays back then? Probably not. It probably just means the episode they're flashing back to ran on that date. But I just sort of had to ask. ********************* There was a news item about soccer fans throwing a toilet bowl out of a stadium, fatally injuring the person it landed on. One question they didn't answer was where the thing came from. I can sort of see a family of soccer fans having an old toilet left over from remodeling or something. It's sitting in the front yard making the place look bad while the wife nags the husband to get rid of it. But he doesn't really know what to do. Then inspiration strikes: The big game is coming up, and if he can manage to sneak the toilet in past the ticket takers and such then there will almost certainly be some moment of peak excitement when people will be throwing stuff. That's when he'll give it the heave-ho. Problem solved. But that doesn't really seem likely. Sneaking something like a toilet past ticket takers and various assorted paranoid security people is no easy task, and there are easier ways of getting rid of it. So scratch that idea. What is more likely is that they were doing construction or remodeling or something in the stadium and the toilet was just sitting there loose in an area that wasn't as secure as the relevant staff people thought it was. Someone saw it as an item of opportunity and the rest is history. So now, assuming it broke when it was thrown, the contractor is one toilet short. So will one restroom stall be forever empty, except perhaps for a memorial plaque explaining why there's no fixture there? Probably not. They'll probably just order a replacement from the factory. But it is a rather amusing image. ********************* Incident Along Fantasy Way 1840 hr 7/28/74 The Derelicts Daytime-- The street is subdued, quiet, drowsing in the sun. Most of the strangeness has faded. Day is less a time for dreaming. I come upon a sign: "TO THE SARGASSO SEA" it says, Pointing to a faint little-used path leading off over a hill. Some sea air would be nice on such a warm day But it is not to be. For being, as all are here, in many places at once, I am also in the supermarket So my Sargasso Sea is instead The Valley of Lost Shopping Carts. From all of space and time come the carts that thoughtless shoppers "Borrow" and neglect to return, Piled in heaps of rusting confusion, the familiar shapes with familiar store names Mixed with antigravity platforms from the far future And with contrivances totally unrecognizable Save that there function has somehow made them eligible To be tossed here. Thomas G. Digby written 1840 hr 7/28/74 entered 2210 hr 2/08/92 ********************* 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 you can tell which list you are on by looking at the email headers. If the headers include a line like this: Silicon Soapware zine with reader comments you are getting it via the list that allows comments (some software may hide part of the line, but there should be enough visible to recognize it). 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