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 #107 New Moon of September 25, 2003 Contents copyright 2003 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. ********************* This month marks forty years since I started my first job, at General Dynamics in Pomona. I'd just graduated with my degree in Electrical Engineering, and was recruited by one of those recruiters who visit college campuses around graduation time. The pay was around eight hundred dollars a month, which was good money back in 1963. I recall having a great Sense of Wonder about it all. Here I was, thousands of miles from the home I grew up in, on the fringes of a major polyglot metropolis. I had grown up in small-to-medium sized towns with a rather homogeneous WASP culture, so the climate here was quite different from what I was used to, both physically and culturally. That job lasted something like four or five months, at which point the contract my unit was working on got canceled and I got laid off. Was this cancellation a result of Johnson becoming President, or was it just coincidence that I was laid off a couple of months after Kennedy died? In any case getting laid off may have been just as well, since the work was very boring. It consisted basically of taking a sort of inventory of the load on each tiny part of a fairly large system, and passing the results on to another group that used it to calculate how reliable the system was likely to be. It might have been a good way to learn one's way around the system, but it was still rather boring. In any event I was out of work for several months until I landed an engineering job on the design of the southern end of the State Water Project. All those gates and valves and such along the canal needed lights and motors and other electrical stuff, so I was part of the Electrical Engineering section that did that. We also did cost estimates and other preliminary design work for the pumping plants along that part of the system, along with the hydroelectric generating plants that recovered some of the pump energy as the water came down the destination side of the mountains it had to be pumped over. The pumping plants and the generating plants were very similar, except for such things as the direction of water flow. That work was somewhat more interesting than the previous job, although it too had boring moments, especially toward the end as the work was winding down but they weren't ready to let people go yet. The pattern after that was similar, with various full-time jobs alternating with periods of unemployment. The main difference was that the jobs were more interesting and were for smaller companies rather than large bureaucracies, and there was some part-time work-at-home stuff during the time between "regular" jobs, so I wasn't completely idle. My longest stay at any one job was a few months short of fourteen years. Right now is another of those "between" times, and again I'm doing some work at home, this time writing computer programs. Is there yet another full-time job in my future? There's no way to know. ********************* The Fall Equinox was a few days ago, amid some of the hottest weather of the year. That reminded me that a few months ago I was worried that a May Day celebration I was involved with would get rained on, because the latter part of April had been unusually cool and damp. And I seem to recall it being cooler and wetter than usual around Summer Solstice as well. Are the gods scrambling the days of the year around at random? ********************* Newcomer to Plergbistan: What's with this bill I got in change? It seems to be marked as "Minus three Plergbistani dollars". Old-timer: It's a minus three dollar bill. Newcomer: Huh? Old-timer: Suppose I owe you four dollars, but I don't have any fours. So I might give you a seven and a minus three. Seven minus three is four. Newcomer: So what do I do with the minus three? Nobody around here seems to want it. Old-timer: You have to keep it for the time being. Sooner or later someone will owe you money. Then you can give it to them to satisfy three dollars' worth of the debt. Newcomer: What if I slip it to a tourist who doesn't know the difference? Old-timer: Don't do it! That would be stealing. Some apparent tourists are undercover cops, and the penalties for theft are quite severe. Likewise, you shouldn't throw it away where somebody might find it. Newcomer: So what if I tear it up or burn it? Old-timer: That would be counterfeiting! That's even more serious than theft. Newcomer: So does that explain that big organized-crime bust a couple of days ago where they caught that gang with a bunch of paper shredders and a pile of money-colored confetti? Old-timer: Yes. ********************* There was an incident where some pro football player got into a fight with another and injured him severely enough to put him out of action for several weeks. It was all over the news, to the extent that even I noticed it, even though I don't usually pay attention to sports stuff. There were quotes from coaches and managers about how they keep telling their players about the importance of not getting into fights with their teammates. The way it was worded seemed to me to indicate that such fights aren't all that rare. Does the kind of macho mentality that leads to success in pro football also tend to lead to personal fights? I'm also reminded that I now and then see items about this or that big- name pro sports player getting arrested for assault or drunk driving or something similar. And again I wonder if success in certain sports, especially football and basketball and maybe hockey, requires a sort of do-it-NOW mentality that doesn't "waste" time pondering the long-term consequences of actions. Has anybody actually studied this? ********************* The words "sex with a bass drum" just sort of popped into my head as I was waking up one morning. It doesn't really make sense, but things like that do just sort of pop up sometimes. But why a bass drum? There's no obvious way to have sex with one, but then who would want to? A snare drum, perhaps? Other musical instruments? Who knows what kinds of perverted things bagpipes and theremins might get into. And don't get me started on musical saws. They're kind of on the fringe of the community anyway, so they're primed for outlaw stuff to begin with. Now a harp, being a symbol of Heaven and all, might be expected to stay on the straight and narrow. But you never can really tell. Some of them might surprise you. But of course we'll probably never really know, since they're all rather bashful about doing anything when humans are around. ********************* Questions abound. Good answers are scarce. Thus has it always been. ********************* Something I've thought about now and then is that when any living cell dies, it's the end of a billion-year lucky streak. Cells reproduce by dividing, so in a sense both daughter cells are the same cell as the parent, and that cell is in turn the same cell as its parent, and so on, back to before the age of the trilobites. When you consider how few of the cells of any complex life form end up in seeds or as eggs or sperm, and how few of those seeds or eggs or sperm cells actually result in offspring that survive to maturity, and how many times a given cell has had to take that chance, you begin to realize how lucky that cell has been up to now. So here I am looking at this cell that had been alive since the days of primordial slime, and now it's dead. Maybe it ended up as part of the food I'm eating, or maybe it's a cell in my body that had the bad luck to end up in a hair follicle where it was called upon to give its life to help form a strand of hair, or maybe it was just some germ that I massacred as part of disinfecting something. In any case its ancestors had had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time to continue surviving, but now its luck has run out. I don't know if this has any bearing on the Meaning of Life, but part of me thinks it might. ********************* Now I'm wondering about entropy and heat death. If you're willing to wait an infinite amount of time, does entropy still spell the final end of the universe (assuming the universe doesn't collapse first)? Or will there eventually be some chance event that reverses entropy enough for another cycle to start? The example I recall seeing mentioned is that in theory it's possible for all the gas molecules in a room to all end up in one part of the room, leaving the rest of the room in vacuum, just by chance. The chances of it happening are infinitesimal, but if you're willing to wait enough zillions of zillions of years it will eventually happen. And then once it happens it will probably collapse into a state with all sorts of air currents eddying around the room, even if the air had been still before that. So I'm wondering if something like that can happen on a larger scale, with a "dead" universe eventually springing back into life again. I suspect it can. Perhaps it's already happened, but with nobody there to notice how long it took. ********************* Hard Act to Follow Last week I arrived early at the poetry reading, And as the first poet got up to read I heard her mutter "That's a hard act to follow." That seemed odd, Because she didn't seem to be following anything at all. Later on I asked her. "No, I wasn't following another poet. But I wasn't following Nothing either. I wasn't following Cosmic Emptiness, The wait for the birth of the universe. I was following your day: The broken copier at the office, The idiot who cut you off on the freeway, Whatever good or bad news had come in the day's mail. And don't forget dinner and the trip here. And it's not like following another poet, Because with another poet I can judge the mood And choose accordingly. No, what I'm following is different for each of you, So there's no one thing I can do that will be right for all. So that's why whoever goes first Has a hard act to follow." Tom Digby written 16:26 May 26, 1995 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. When you receive an email confirmation request go to the URL it will give you. (If you're already on the list and want to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list posting you receive.) To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I currently do that one manually. -- END --