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/~bubbles/ Issue #81 New Moon of August 18, 2001 Contents copyright 2001 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. ********************* As I was browsing around the Sunnyvale Public Library I noticed something interesting: The various colors of Fairy Books were filed under "non- fiction". Now if I were to ask the librarians about this they'd probably say something to the effect that those books are collected folktales which aren't classified the same as written-by-an-author fiction. That would be a perfectly normal-sounding logical explanation. But it might or might not be the truth. Remember Clarke's thing about advanced technology looking like magic? What if it was actually the other way around? Maybe many of those little Silicon Valley startups weren't really working with silicon at all. That supposed "silicon foundry" in Taiwan or wherever that made their chips for them was actually a hill full of Little People a few miles in from the Bay. And the financial bubble finally burst when the various magical beings decided that there were getting to be too many humans going too crazy over too much money in too little space. Yes, there are non-magical companies around. But even so, it'll be pretty hard to prove that Silicon Valley wasn't mostly based on magic. ********************* While musing on "Jurassic Park" and related topics I got to thinking of reviving the passenger pigeon from whatever DNA might be found. Since this species went extinct fairly recently, largely as a result of having been hunted by humans, and the feathers had been used on hats and such, there should be quite a few good specimens around to get DNA from. Of course there are questions. First, is the DNA all we need? In many species some aspects of behavior are learned from parents and such rather than being hard-wired. Would we be able to fill those gaps? Do we even know where the gaps would be? For example, some parts of the song, and of courtship rituals in general (of which the song is often a part) are learned in many species. Were passenger pigeon courtship rituals learned or hard-wired? Would scientists end up producing pigeon pornography to show the fledglings what to do when they grew up? Migration is another thing that might need to be taught. How much of the procedure is in the DNA, and how much was learned from following the older birds in the flock? Could model planes or something be adapted to this if need be? Even if we do solve the technical problems, does the world still have a place for passenger pigeons? Have the nesting grounds been taken over by other species (including humans)? Are their food sources still there? How well would a flock that darkens the skies for miles fit into the traffic patterns over a major airport? In a way this reminds me of various stories where someone returns from a long voyage or wakes from a long sleep to find that all their friends and family are gone and they no longer have a place in the world they once called home. ********************* Remember the old anti-drunk-driving slogan "Alcohol and gasoline don't mix"? Will they have to retire it now that they're putting ethanol in gasoline as an additive? ********************* Sunnyvale has been having a summer music thing on Wednesdays, where they close off a couple of downtown streets and set up a stage and booths and such. This immediate past one was Jazz. I found it a little too loud to be comfortable, but it was otherwise enjoyable. This was a seven-piece jazz band: Trumpet, trombone, tuba, two saxes, drums, and piano. They were all amplified. But does a seven-piece jazz band really need amplification? The piano was electronic, but as far as I could tell the other instruments were pretty much the same as when bands used to play in bandstands in the park back before electronic amplification had even been invented. Bands used to play outdoors without amplification, and from what I've been told people could usually hear them. Of course they didn't have airplanes flying over on their way to a nearby airport, and the crowd may not have been talking as loudly as this one seemed to be doing. And many such bands may have been bigger than seven pieces. But even so, I suspect a brass band today could survive without amplification. So what's the problem? Do audiences simply expect bands to be too loud nowadays? The satirist in me wants to take this to ridiculous extremes: A Scottish bagpipe troupe, amplified. The speakers are two stories tall, and the group itself is inside a soundproof chamber because an unprotected human cannot survive within a kilometer of amplified bagpipes. The audience sits in a rough circle several miles from ground zero. It hasn't come to that yet, but it might. ********************* I could expound on the ethics of super-heroes. Slow Wave (http://www.slowwave.com) is a Web-based dream journal. One of the dreams written up recently was where somebody was shopping with Yoda, and piled up a huge cart full of stuff. When they got to the checkout the bill came to well over a thousand dollars. He didn't have the money, but Yoda just told the clerk it would all be free and the clerk zeroed the bill. Now this was just somebody's dream, and all kinds of weird things happen in dreams. But would Yoda do that in real life? It doesn't seem quite ethical to me, unless there's some big overriding reason. Even if it doesn't get the checkout clerk in trouble, it will show up as inventory shrinkage which cuts into profits and will eventually get factored into future pricing policies. So in the long term shareholders may suffer a bit and prices may go up slightly. In this particular dream the store was a large chain, so a thousand dollars here or there may be too small to see above the background noise. But does that make it OK? What if it had happened at some mom & pop place that had been just barely squeaking by? Maybe Yoda ought to be more careful about who dreams about him. ********************* Somebody tossed a chocolate chip cookie onto the neighbor's garage roof, where it was visible from my window. Some birds came and pecked at it, while others did not. After a couple of days it disappeared, perhaps taken by a squirrel or something. This could mean that some birds sort of like chocolate chip cookies even though others do not. Since birds are believed to have descended from dinosaurs, it may be reasonable to infer that had chocolate chip cookies existed back then some dinosaurs would have liked them while others would not have. And whatever mammals existed back then might or might not have stolen the cookies away from the dinosaurs. The truth, however, may never be known unless scientists either do a Jurassic Park type of thing or invent time travel. ********************* Someone at a lunch get-together was telling about a young woman she knew whose parents were from India. She wants to go to college and become a veterinarian while the parents want to arrange a traditional marriage for her and don't really think a college education is all that desirable for women. Others in the group also knew of people in similar situations. That got me to thinking of someone migrating in the opposite direction, and of other analogous situations. In particular, in the movie "Time After Time" a time traveler from London in the 1890's and an American woman in the late 1970's or thereabouts fall in love and he ends up taking her back to his home to marry her. The movie ended there, but I got to wondering how well they got along after that. Not only might she miss modern conveniences, but social mores were quite different. Would she conform totally? Would she become known around 1890's London society as sort of eccentric? Would the stress of the whole situation be too much to handle? If she got pregnant, would she be willing to trust herself and the child to 1890's doctors? Her situation might make an interesting movie in itself. ********************* Somehow I got to thinking about the phrase "It looks like suicide, but they don't know who did it." Normally that would seem nonsensical by the definition of "suicide", but it might make sense in a science-fiction or fantasy context of people swapping minds and bodies around. They find one body dead, pretty definitely suicide, but they don't know what mind was occupying it at the time: Suicide, but they don't know who did it. ********************* Another random thing I got to wondering about recently: If vampires can turn into bats, do they have the bat sonar sense? If so, do they have it all the time or only when in bat form? Having it all the time would be useful in the dark bedrooms vampires often sneak around in. If they do have it while in human form, does it get frequency-shifted down to where humans can hear it? I might expect that to happen because of the different hearing ranges of humans and bats, and also because humans are much larger than non-vampire bats and larger things tend to be associated with lower frequencies. But if humans can hear vampire sonar, then why don't the legends mention it? If they do have sonar but it's always ultrasonic even in human form, then it should be possible to build a vampire detector that sounds an alarm when it picks up sound at the relevant frequencies. That's 1930's technology. But even before we knew how to build detectors, could dogs hear it? If vampire sonar is above human hearing but enough lower than regular bat sonar that dogs and such can hear it, that might explain some accounts of animals acting strangely around vampires. Also might a vampire, even in human form, be sensitive to things like ultrasonic dog whistles? That might be another way to detect them. ********************* And speaking of vampires ... 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 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. 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