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 #94 New Moon of September 6, 2002 Contents copyright 2002 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. ********************* Here I sit, deep in thought, wondering where my next idea will be coming from. It's a very insecure feeling, having no idea what my next idea might be. But logic tells me it cannot be otherwise. If I knew what my next idea would be, then I would have already had it and it wouldn't be my next idea. So as long as I keep having new ideas, I'll never know in advance what they'll be. I'll just have to have faith that there will indeed be more ideas coming along in the future, even if I can't know anything more than that ahead of time. ********************* Nearby Stanford University has a sculpture collection including a number of pieces by Rodin, of "Thinker" fame. One of these is a set of massive bronze doors titled "The Gates of Hell". The doors are set in a chunk of wall, but it isn't the main wall of a normal building. It appears to have been specially built to hold the piece. It's maybe two or three times as wide as the doors themselves, and a few feet thick. And if you walk around behind it you see another door, this one looking more mundane. When I was there it was locked. Part of me figures this door is to provide access to the bolts and such that hold the massive sculpture in place. But other parts of me prefer to think in terms of some Back Door of Hell, used by minor demons whose comings and goings are not of sufficient import to justify a ceremonial opening of the main portal. There was a plaque on the front side of the wall discussing some aspects of the great bronze sculpture. But of the back door there was no mention at all. And the door itself was blank, without a sign or nameplate or even a number. Maybe the minor demons prefer to go about their business incognito? ********************* While I was thinking about the Rodin pieces it occurred to me that in the future a sculptor could design a piece via computer, and the computer would then grind out the physical piece in as many copies as the artist (or whoever had access to the files) desired. Will this erode the concept of an "original" and limited editions? In a sense this is already the case with castings, since the real "original" is plaster or wax or a mold or some such. But it hasn't really been a problem since they came up with the concept of numbered editions. So I suspect they would do the same thing with computer- generated art of whatever sort. So even if you keep the master files as a historical record of the creation of the piece, once the numbered run is finished that's It for instances of the item legitimately labeled as "original". ********************* Has it ever occurred to you that every time something dies, it's the end of a billion-year lucky streak? The cells in whatever it was (such as a bite of food) started as some primal cell, then were lucky at each division. Every time, the daughter cell survived to make another division. Then once the lucky cell got into being part of some multi-cellular creature, it always happened to end up as some kind of reproductive cell, sperm or egg or pollen or whatever, depending on the type of thing it was evolving into. And if it was sperm, it happened to be the one sperm that won the race to the egg, which was similarly lucky to end up being an egg that got fertilized. But eventually the luck ran out. This time, instead of a gonad cell, it became muscle or perhaps part of a seed that was harvested for food rather than being planted again. Or maybe it's part of that mosquito you just swatted, or it's dead protein in one of your fingernails, or it ended up in a leaf that's just now starting to turn autumn colors. In any event, that cell's billion-year lucky streak just ended, even though some of its siblings may live on. ********************* There's been some debate in the WELL's science conference about Evolution vs Creation, during which it occurred to me that we can't really "prove" evolution. Sure, evolution has been demonstrated to work for adjusting sizes and proportions and fine-tuning colors and other such variables, but I don't think we can demonstrate that that's how totally new subsystems and topologies arise. The problem is that the scale of the system is a whole planet over millions or billions of years, and we can't hope to duplicate that in the laboratory. And the fossil record is not enough. We can see how some major feature appears to have evolved in a series of steps, but we can't tell what triggered the changes for each new step. It seems possible that over millions and billions of years enough extremely lucky bits of happenstance have happened to lead to where we are today, but we can't really be sure. Perhaps it was some Intelligent Designer, phasing in some new design in stages, and using natural selection to test each stage of the process. We don't have enough data to rule out either theory. If we were to meet an interstellar civilization that had been surveying millions of planets over millions or billions of years, they might be able to give us enough data to say with statistical confidence that a Designer was or was not needed for some of the steps. But short of something like that, we can't really say. ********************* I got to thinking about a future where we know enough about the brain to either select or engineer people for particular personality traits. And I also got to thinking about interstellar colonization. If you were about to send out an interstellar colonizing ship to seek out and settle suitable planets, and you had a choice of people predisposed to wanderlust or people who would prefer familiar surroundings, which would you choose? Would you want people with wanderlust in hopes that they would be more motivated to explore distant reaches of the galaxy, or would stay-at- homes be better suited to the long voyages in the cramped confines of the ship? And what when a suitable planet was found? Would you want stay-at-homes to form a stable colony, or wanderers to explore all parts of that new world, or would you want some of each, some to form stable settlements while others explored the wilderness? And what other personality traits might you want more or less of than you normally find in the general population? ********************* Someone decades younger than me was talking about how train whistles made her feel nostalgic. But her nostalgia object wasn't the steam-train whistle of my childhood. It was the whistle on a modern diesel. I've heard some of those, and to me they sound more like car horns than train whistles. But that's the only train whistle she's ever known. What other nostalgia objects will be different for future generations? ********************* I saw an amusing headline in the paper a few days ago. There had been some kind of financial problems at an African-American chapter of the Chamber of Commerce, and the people in charge in the main San Jose office hadn't noticed it for a while. So the headline on the article was "S.J. might have missed signs of trouble at black chamber" Thing was, I was attending a science fiction convention at the time, so when I saw the words "black chamber" I instantly thought "dungeon" before I thought "Chamber of Commerce". I showed it around. Some people reacted the same way I did and found it amusing, but others didn't. I guess that just means that people are different. And I sort of wonder if I would have reacted the same way had I not been at a science fiction convention. ********************* One of the women at the convention was wearing a T-shirt with a line about being a girl who can't say "No". That led to thoughts of telling her to open her mouth with the ends of her lips drawn in toward the middle to make a sort of circle, then put the tip of her tongue up against the roof of her mouth and start humming. Then while still humming, bring the tongue down away from the roof of the mouth. If I've described the position of lips and tongue properly, that's how you say "No." But she was busy working one of the convention desks, and I didn't know what condition her sense of humor was in, so I didn't say anything. ********************* A couple of weeks ago I read a rather creepy story in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction", involving some kind of ancient stone sarcophagus that was somehow alive. Woe to anyone unlucky enough to be imprisoned inside. They would be slowly eaten alive, unable to die until the very end. After the creepiness started to subside I got to wondering about where the thing came from. Did ancient artisans and magicians make it, or did some mad god deliver it to the priests already in its final form? This leaves me wondering in general: If the ancients did indeed make various and sundry accursed artifacts (as opposed to having them handed down by gods or extraterrestrials or the like) how long did it take them to master the required arts? How much horror and tragedy did they suffer before they learned the necessary safeguards to hold the evil in check? Did they have failure after failure, some with loss of life, like we did with the space program in more modern times? And why haven't more stories of those times come down to us? ********************* A recent conversation about politics got onto prostitution, and someone claimed that the prostitutes (or maybe their managers) don't want it legalized, at least as long as the risk of arrest remains low, because they can charge more when it's illegal. That later led to thoughts of some kind of satire where the makers of something we consider a necessity (such as groceries or shoes) get it declared illegal. The law usually takes bribes to look the other way as the providers of the illegal necessity charge much higher prices than we're used to and rake in much higher profits, with only small risk. Maybe the idea spreads until everything is illegal. Those in charge like it that way, because it's easier to bust people they don't like when everybody is breaking the law. ********************* The anniversary of the events of September 11 is coming up. This seems appropriate: Lessons in Pain When the evil ruler arrives in the Martyr's Paradise May he begin to learn. May the maidens who serve his carnal desires Begin to arouse deeper feelings. Little by little, over eons of eternity, May he learn to share his soul. Then once he has learned love, Let him learn pain: Beyond the physical pain of fire or falling buildings, Let him know the cutting short of hopes and dreams, The desperation of having to choose one death over another, The fallen comrades and the empty firehouse, The child whose parents will never return, And the emptiness of the hole in the heart when a loved one's fate is simply Unknown. Let every death that has brought him joy Now bring its full measure of sorrow. And then ... Knowing that whatever we ask for others we also ask for ourselves, And that I too have caused my share of pain, Once we have known the pain we have caused, Let the gods be merciful. -- Tom Digby Written 18:16 12/19/2001 ********************* 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. 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