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 #244 New Moon of October 23, 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. ********************* About six months ago people I knew were joyfully chanting: Hooray, hooray, the first of May! Outdoor [sexual activity] begins today. But I've never heard any mention of any sort of official end to that activity. Now it's just about Halloween, but I am not hearing the likes of: Hear the mournful autumn wind! Outdoor [sexual activity] is at an end. People are left to decide for themselves when to discontinue outdoor sexual activity. I've encountered this kind of thing before. When I was a child, living with my parents in a beach town that did a fair amount of tourist business, there would be a big Beach Opening festival every June, usually right after schools in the surrounding area had closed for the summer. But there was no Beach Closing festival in the fall. People just sort of quit going to the beach when it wasn't beach weather any more or when school started, whichever came first. I've also noticed the opposite pattern, in which a season of some sort of activity just sort of sneaks up on people, builds to a climax, and then ends with a big celebration. The year-end holiday shopping and decorating and carol-singing season, which starts building between Halloween and Thanksgiving and goes out with a bang on Christmas Day (with a few remnants hanging on until New Year's) is a prime example. Some have tried to define an "official" start to that holiday season, but with limited success. So a festive time with a well-defined beginning and a well-defined end seems to be the exception, at least in this society. ********************* One of the local baseball teams made it to the World Series, and some local people decided to celebrate by driving their cars to a major street intersection, where they made the cars skid round and round, screeching tires and making great clouds of smoke. They left when the cops showed up. Apparently something about cars skidding round and round in major street intersections, screeching tires and making great clouds of smoke, is technically illegal. So people who do such things tend to avoid cops. Be that as it may, the news reports of all that activity got me to thinking about self-driving cars. As they come from the factory they probably will refuse to go skidding round and round in major street intersections, screeching tires and making great clouds of smoke. I like to imagine the request and refusal as a dialog somewhat like the scene in the movie "2001" where Hal refuses to open the pod bay doors, but I suspect it won't be quite like that. Anyway, if you're a good enough computer hacker you might be able to overcome the obstacles and make your car do it anyway, but that will probably be technically illegal and you won't want to be around when the cops show up. I suppose if you're good enough at computer hacking you could send your self-driving car out to your favorite street intersection to skid round and round and screech tires and make great clouds of smoke, while you stay far away with lots of witnesses so as to have an airtight alibi, but the cops have ways of figuring out who's really responsible for stuff like that, and once they figure out it was you you won't like what happens next. So it may be just as well that self-driving cars won't really care who wins the World Series. ********************* There's an election coming up, and some of the campaign rhetoric talks of some proposed laws putting too much power in the hands of a "politician". I was reminded of other elections in years past in which some faction railed against giving power to "bureaucrats". That led me to wonder what the difference is between a "bureaucrat" and a "politician". They probably aren't formally defined unless some agency somewhere is using them in official titles, which seems unlikely given the generally negative connotations of both terms. But even if they aren't formally defined people claim to know one when they see one. I'm thinking mainly about politicians and bureaucrats in government agencies. Analogous beings exist in private industry, but the nomenclature is somewhat different. Politicians and bureaucrats have some things in common. They are both decision-makers, and even though the rules for making those decisions are usually spelled out in detail, there is often a gray area where the decision can go either way... I could go on, but I'm starting to think that this is not one of the burning questions of the age. It seemed to be worthy of thought at the outset, but as I trudge on through it seems less and less urgent. Like many other people, even when I haven't thought about the differences between a bureaucrat and a politician I pretty much know which is which when I see them. Anyone who doesn't know the difference by now may wish to consult Wikipedia or something. As for me, my time may be better spent pondering the differences between crows, ravens, and writing desks, not to mention computer keyboards and monitors. ********************* "I've heard scientists using the phrase "false vacuum" and I"m wondering what it means. "It's kind of hard to explain." "Is it about some big scandal of door-to-door salespeople selling bogus vacuum cleaners to households full of scientists who are too busy dreaming up new theories to check the consumer ratings of their household appliances?" "No." "So what is it then?" "It's kind of hard to explain." ********************* As I write this the local weather forecast is showing rain for Halloween. Se we may see some unhappy children in soggy wet costumes, making the evening Trick or Treat rounds but doomed to bring home only soggy wet treats. This being Silicon Valley, some of those soggy wet unhappy kids may be genius enough to know something about Chaos Theory and the so-called "Butterfly effect". This is the conjecture that a butterfly flapping its wings may change the course of a storm halfway around the world (If you want to know more, paste the phrase into Wikipedia's search thing). But these super-smart kids are still kids, and like other kids their age may want revenge. So they may feel the urge to go to China or Brazil or wherever, find whichever butterfly flapped its wings wrong, and swat it. Or maybe they'll use their unfettered childish imaginations to dream up more horrific punishments, many too gruesome to list here, to inflict on that unfortunate creature. But alas, that quest is probably doomed to failure. Even if it's possible to run the calculations backward to find out which butterfly or sea gull or whatever was to blame for the storm getting here just at Halloween, that responsibility may be shared among several wing-flappers and bubble-blowers and cigarette smokers and others who in some small way disturbed the atmosphere at some crucial moment. And even if they hadn't done it, something else might have. So direct revenge with confirmation is probably not feasible. But you might take a piece of cardboard and wave it in the general direction of whatever place you think the offender was when they did the crucial wing-flap or whatever that ended up ruining your children's Halloween. There's a very slight (but probably not zero) chance that you will end up sucking those responsible up into a tornado or striking them down with lightning or something. So you can at least get the satisfaction of imagining getting your revenge that way. ********************* Speaking of California's rainy season possibly being about to start... Winter Construction We're half the year away From May. The dance of the ribbons and the joyful proclamations Of the season of outdoor frolic Are but dim memories, distant and unreal. This is a time for turning inward, As Nature rebuilds the world. As the cool rains of winter Bring new life to the parched land We gather 'round the hearth By Jack-O-Lantern light To welcome back old friends From the other side of Eternity. Then we defy the deepest darkness With strings of artificial stars And feast on songs of joy Among loved ones in the here and now. Finally, as the sun takes its first baby steps back to us We can begin to look forward To another season of light, When Nature once again takes down Her cold gray Construction signs And the time of outdoor frolic is proclaimed anew. -- Tom Digby First Draft 11:52 Sat October 22 2005 Edited 13:33 Sun October 23 2005 ********************* 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. 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