SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us http://www.well.com/user/bubbles/ Issue #55 New Moon of July 12, 1999 Contents copyright 1999 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. If you don't want to read about the mechanics of this, skip down to the row of asterisks (****). If you're getting it via email and the headers show the originating site as "lists.best.com" you're getting the list version, and anything you send to DigbyZine@lists.best.com will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation (although so far traffic has been light). If there's no mention of "lists.best.com" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The content is the same for both. To get on or off the conversation-list version send email to DigbyZine-request@lists.best.com with the word "subscribe" (to get on the list) or "unsubscribe" (to get off) in the body, but nothing else (except maybe your signature if that's automatic). Then when you get a confirmation message edit the REJECT in the subject line to ACCEPT and send it back. To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I do that one manually. ********************* We are close to the 30th anniversary of the first Moon landing. So here's a slightly edited version of something I did up a few years back to distribute at a science fiction club meeting. July 20, 1969 was a Sunday. Various people active in L.A. science fiction fandom gathered at a party that day to watch the event on TV. The spacecraft landed early in the afternoon, Los Angeles time, with the original schedule calling for the astronauts to sleep on board for several hours and come out late that night. The astronauts, however, didn't really feel like sleeping, so the schedule was revised to put the historic First Step somewhere around dusk, L.A. time. One minor point is that had they followed the original schedule it would have been after midnight on the East Coast, with the result that the date for the first steps on the Moon would've been July 21 in part of the country and July 20 in the rest. As it was, at touchdown it was midnight somewhere around eastern Europe, and when they actually got out and started walking around it was midnight in mid-Atlantic. Thus you may see either July 20 or July 21 in your history books, depending on what time zone the writer is using. In almost anything involving spacecraft there are short action-packed moments separated by long periods of nothing happening. Such was the case here. The TV networks filled in with all sorts of background info and simulations and interviews with scientists and the like. Some of us at the party stayed faithfully by the TV, while others milled around the refreshment table or conversed out on the front porch. The craft was in Lunar orbit. To get from orbit to ground you fire retro-rockets, then wait an appreciable fraction of an orbital period as you slowly lose altitude. Firing the rockets for landing is literally a last-minute affair (or maybe the last few minutes of a half-hour descent). As the altitude readings got lower and lower the percentage of party-goers around the TV got higher and higher. Finally it came down to the last few meters. When they announced touchdown and cut the engines a cheer rang out from the assembled fans. When the original schedule was calling for the crew to spend their first hours on the Lunar surface asleep on board their craft I had similar ideas and went home to take a nap. I was following things on the radio, though, and adjusted my schedule accordingly when the plans changed. While at home I did grab my Polaroid camera (Home video recorders weren't common then). I took several test shots of the screen during the preliminaries to see if the idea would work. It seemed to, sort of, although I didn't get really close enough to the screen because that would've blocked other people's views too much. There are several things I remember thinking about during the actual Moon walk. One was an unexpected feeling of the loss of some old childhood dream of building a rocket ship in my back yard or something and getting there first myself. It had been in the back of my mind all those years even though I hadn't really taken it seriously for a long time. Another was that without the blue sky of Earth to lighten the shadows, sunlight on the Moon reminded me of a yard lit at night by just one light bulb. And another was the line, "It so seldom rains on the Moon." It just sort of popped into my head. It didn't really make much sense at the time but it sounded kind of poetic, like the kind of 60's rock song that perhaps meant something to the singer singing it even if the audience never figured it out. That line kept coming back to me for years afterward, until I finally figured out something to do with it. You see the result at the end of this zine. ********************* One of the things one needs to do sooner or later when moving to a new part of the country is to get a new dentist. He's working out pretty well, but one thing puzzles him. He isn't sure what metal my crowns and such are made of. I assume my old L.A. dentist will eventually tell him, but so far no luck. What came to my mind, perhaps from too much exposure to science fiction, was "an unknown alloy". Maybe my old dentist somehow got hold of a piece of crashed UFO, and he knew nobody he tried to tell about it would believe him, and keeping it around made him a target for the dreaded Men In Black, and gold was very expensive that year while this stuff was nice and sturdy, so he got rid of his piece of crashed UFO by melting it down for dental stuff. So depending on how big a chunk of the stuff he had, there could be hundreds of us walking around with pieces of melted-down UFO in our mouths. Should we alert Mulder and Scully? ********************* Speaking of dentists, do dead people get cavities? Do teeth continue to decay after someone dies, or can those particular bacteria survive only in a living mouth? The stereotype is for old skulls to still have most of their teeth, even though dead people don't brush or floss. But maybe that's just because dead people don't get toothaches, or at least don't seem to do anything about them. ********************* Something else to worry about: Cartoonland Power and Light has a couple of nucular power plants. Unlike the nuclear power plants other power companies use, these work by cartoon physics. The electricity they generate tends to make appliances do strange things, even when it's been diluted with "regular" electricity in the lines on its way to your house. So don't buy your power from them, even if their rates do seem attractive. ********************* Some of you may have seen the movie "Wild Wild West", or perhaps are familiar with the TV series it's based on. It's a sort of science- fiction western, set around 1870. There are science-fiction gadgets, but of such a nature that they supposedly could have been built with 1870's technology. What I'm wondering is how feasible those gadgets actually are. Could they have actually been built back then? For example, there's a giant eight-legged steam-powered walking machine. It isn't explicitly stated how the legs are controlled, but it appears that they are at least somewhat automatic because in a couple of scenes the thing is walking along with only one or two people aboard, and those people are not busy with controls for individual leg motion. Is there some system of cams or something that puts each leg through a preset sequence of motions sufficient at least for walking on level ground? Charles Babbage proposed the Analytical Engine (a digital computer built of gears and other mechanical parts) decades before the time of this movie. So could some sort of simple computer control have been possible? There's also the question of whether the type of construction shown, with steel girders and hydraulics and cables and gears all powered by steam, would have had sufficient strength to function. Any mechanical engineers out there? And don't forget the smaller gadgets. One item, the magnetic collar, clearly uses cartoon physics. But might the others actually have been possible? ********************* It So Seldom Rains on the Moon Hallways are silent, the city's asleep. Night's a tradition we cling to and keep. Out for a walk as I sort through a heap Of memories, thoughts out of tune, Like running through rain by a seashore in June -- But it so seldom rains on the Moon And the memories tied to the sea and the rain Remain ... It says in the schedule it's autumn today But why even bother I really can't say -- Freeze-dried December and vacuum-packed May Wrapped up in a sterile cocoon -- Atmosphere dome like the bowl of a spoon And it so seldom rains on the Moon But the memories tied to the sea and the rain Remain ... So why did we come here and why don't we go? It's something of freedom and room for to grow -- We can't quite explain it, you may never know Or else you may see it quite soon -- We're not going back to that big blue balloon Though it so seldom rains on the Moon And the memories tied to the sea and the rain Remain ... Thomas G. Digby written 0235 hr 4/14/76 entered 1210 hr 3/05/92 -- END --