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 #232 New Moon of November 3, 2013 Contents copyright 2013 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. ********************* In a couple of weeks we'll be seeing the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination: November 22, 1963. For a while it was sort of customary for people to ask one another "Where were you when you heard the news?" Then over the years as the most common answer changed from "at work" or "in school" to "kindergarten" to "too young to remember" to "not born yet" people gradually quit asking. I was at work, at my first job. I had just gotten my college degree and had been hired straight out of college by a big defense contractor in the Los Angeles area. It was routine engineering-type stuff, mostly checking the designers' work by calculating stresses on components in a missile. This was before cubicles were common, with the workspace being one large room with row upon row of desks. Although I never paid attention to it, there must have been a steady background hum of conversation, typewriters, and other such noises. The assassination happened at 12:30 pm Dallas time, which was 10:30 am California time. I don't know exactly what time we actually got the news, but sometime in the late morning I sensed something different in the general mood. I don't know what it was I noticed, perhaps a change in the background noise, but all of a sudden things just sort of felt different. Then people around me started saying that the President had been shot. I don't know how they got the news: Perhaps someone had heard it on their car radio on the way to a meeting or something, or maybe someone's friends had phoned them with the news. However the news got there, it spread throughout the office almost instantly. Then someone came on the office speaker system and confirmed it. I wasn't completely taken by surprise. I'd heard about the supposed Zero-year Jinx whereby a long string of presidents elected in years ending in zero had died in office. So even before the 1960 election I was sort of half-expecting something to happen to whoever won. One thing that I wasn't expecting was the mass outpouring of collective guilt from the media: "We all killed Kennedy." Supposedly our culture glorified violence and therefore led Oswald (and/or various conspirators) to do it. Or something like that. I never really quite figured it out. The other major development that I noticed was a push for gun-control legislation. Since Oswald had bought the murder weapon by mail, people starting calling for restrictions on "mail-order guns". So we started getting rules requiring waiting periods and ID checks and such for gun purchases, along with restrictions on weapons with certain physical features. There were other social and political ramifications spreading out like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond. This was a major factor in defining what people nowadays refer to as "the Sixties". ********************* In addition to the JFK shooting, we recently had another round-number anniversary of a media event that has over the years become legendary. So where were you when Martians invaded Earth? For this one my answer is "I wasn't born yet." When I asked my parents they said they were out on a date and missed it. The date was October 30, 1938, seventy-five years ago, and it was the famous (or infamous) radio drama of the War of the Worlds. And as usual nowadays, Wikipedia has an article on it: The War of the Worlds (radio drama) You might want to read it. ********************* We also have Veterans Day coming up. This year will be the 95th anniversary of the end of the First World War. That means that this coming year will mark the hundredth anniversary of various events leading up to the start of that war. It's something else you might want to follow. ********************* A couple of weeks ago my bottle of one-daily multivitamin tablets ran out. So I went to the drugstore to buy more. They didn't seem to have the exact kind I'd been taking, so I looked for the closest equivalent. They had several expensive name brands, but only a limited selection of store-brand stuff, labeled as coming in separate men's and women's versions. I got the men's. Then I got to wondering what if you were to take the wrong kind? Say there's a heterosexual couple living together, each taking their sex-appropriate vitamins. But then one of them runs out of pills and it isn't convenient for them to go to the drugstore, so that person starts taking the other's vitamins. They figure "vitamins are vitamins" and taking the "wrong" ones for a while shouldn't make much difference as long as they switch back to the "right" pills as soon as possible. But what if they're wrong? I once saw a cartoon where a man and his dog got into an accident of some sort. The ambulance people had human blood plasma and dog plasma, but got the bottles switched so the man got the canine version while the dog got the human stuff. Hilarity ensued, with the man doing dog-like things while the dog took on more of a human role. So if our vitamin-sharing couple are cartoon characters something similar could happen to them. But what of the rest of us? Does it really make any difference? ********************* A few days ago they tore down a house at the other end of the block. I pass the site fairly often on the way to other places, and so far it doesn't look much different from any other torn-down house. But you never know. Since the last time I looked the cops may have planted the lot with poison ivy to keep time-traveling burglars from camping there and going back in time to when there was a house there that their campsite would have been inside of. That's not a common M.O. for burglars, but that may be because the cops are diligent about planting poison ivy where houses have been torn down. You may doubt me because you've never seen cops planting poison ivy at the sites of torn-down houses. That's because they're careful not to stir up too much publicity lest they start a panic about time-traveling criminals and government agencies abusing time travel to fight them. Likewise, if you go to the police station and ask them if they plant poison ivy on the sites of torn-down houses they'll look at you funny and say No. If the police do tell you they don't plant poison ivy on the sites of torn-down houses it's best to at least pretend to believe them. This is not the kind of thing you want to get into arguments with the cops about. ********************* I've been seeing stuff in the news lately about high-school football players suffering permanent brain damage from concussions. The problem isn't limited to the high-school level, but that's where the emphasis seems to be. It also isn't limited to football, but it's probably more serious there than most other high school sports. Something also reminded me of those indicators that you can attach to delicate stuff like electronics when you ship it. If the package gets a severe bump that might damage the contents, the indicator changes color or something. So I got to thinking: What if you put those on football helmets? If it changes color or whatever it indicates the player should be looked at by a doctor or other qualified expert before being allowed to continue playing. You might object that that kind of indicator is too simple to be useful. What you need to be looking for is a pattern, not one simple jolt. OK, then maybe that simple indicator won't work. But nowadays you should be able to put an array of accelerometers, a fairly respectable computer to analyze patterns of impacts, and batteries good for longer than a game will normally last into a football helmet without appreciably altering its feel or performance. Put an LED on the outside, and if during the course of a game it changes from a slow green flash (which tells you the thing is working) to a more rapid yellow or red pattern you know that player at least needs to be looked at. This could also be set up to record all the bumps and jolts for an entire game, to be fed to external storage afterward. Then if a player shows symptoms later this would allow after-the-fact analysis, like the "black box" on an airplane. Is anyone doing this? If not, shouldn't they be? ********************* Halloween stuff is fading until next year, but someone's mention of a TV series in which vampires are coming out to demand equal rights with the living reminded me of this: Incident Along Fantasy Way Rush Hour The party was fun, But it lasted longer than usual. By the time my bus arrives The sky is beginning to lighten. It is standing room only, and hardly any of that -- A sea of pallid faces. I resist the urge to draw my coat collar tighter: In these days of hemoglobin pie in the supermarkets And bars serving real Bloody Marys I need not fear vampires -- And besides, someone might be offended. Three stops later is the cemetery. Then I have the bus Almost to myself. Thomas G. Digby written 2325 hr 12/14/74 entered 1240 hr 4/09/92 ********************* 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). To comment, simply email your comment to ss_talk@lists.plergb.com (which you can often do by hitting "Reply All" or "Reply to List") from the address at which you got the zine. The list will not accept comments from non-member addresses. If the Subject line includes the phrase "SS_Talk Digest" you are getting the digest version. 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