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 #96 New Moon of November 4, 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. ********************* Halloween is over. The "Pumpkin Patch" on a nearby busy street corner has been de-pumpkinified (if that's a word). The scarecrows and the bundles of cornstalks that gave the place a farm-like ambience are gone. Only a few bales of hay remain. The inflatable Giant Slide that delighted so many children lies flat on the ground, empty of the air that upheld it. The whole place looks rather desolate. I expect the former Pumpkin Patch to sooner or later be reborn as a Christmas tree lot, although I don't know when that will happen. Some stores already have Santa Claus figures and wrapping paper and decorations on display, even though traditional purists say that the Yuletide season should not begin until after Thanksgiving. Stores like to have the Christmas season start earlier because they believe a longer season helps them sell more stuff. So has Christmas now grown to hit right smack up against Halloween? And will Halloween be strong enough to stop the trend? It's becoming a major home-decorating and candy-eating holiday, a strong merchandising festival in its own right, so Christmas may not be able to push past it as it has apparently pushed past Thanksgiving. Or if Christmas can't push past Halloween, might it infiltrate it by stealth, by having the likes of Santa Claus and the Three Wise men as costume choices? And what of the other end of the season, when Christmas Day is past? In past years I've seen a few Valentine Trees with heart-shaped lights. Will that become common in future years? When will it all end? ********************* Some dental problems over the last month or so got me to thinking about dentistry in Cartoonland. How might it be different from dentistry in our world? First, there would be a greater variety of patients, some with teeth a bit like ours, but others quite alien. Some would have something like our incisors and canines and molars and such, others would have rows of perfectly even rectangular teeth, and still others would have a mouth full of more or less random pointy things. And don't forget vampire fangs. And it would not be unheard of for each tooth to literally have a mind of its own, especially in such matters as deciding when to hurt and whether or not to get numb when anesthetic is given. Also, some dental procedures that would not be accepted or even possible in our world would be fairly normal there. For example, suppose they want to extract a tooth but can't get a good grip on it with their pliers. So they do a root canal, but fill it with nitroglycerine. Then they seal it up and slap the patient on that side of the face. BANG! The tooth is out. There's one problem: It tends to come flying out like a bullet, and is likely to ricochet all around the room, doing whatever damage is funniest. So that procedure is only used as a last resort. It would also be more accepted for people to go into dentistry because they enjoy inflicting pain. And patients would more or less have to go to those dentists when their discomfort is funny. What other differences might there be? ********************* Is "DC ad inf" (repeat ad infinitum) a valid direction to put on a piece of music? It probably wasn't in the days of mortal human musicians with their limited endurance, but might it be so now that such music can be played by tireless computers? ********************* Back when the DC-area sniper was still at large, there was a report that they had left behind a Tarot card with something like "Dear Police, I am God" written on it. That ties in with something mentioned earlier about the psychological profiles of other such criminals in the past: They're playing God by exercising the power to end people's lives. But are they really God? No. If they were really God they would have much better things to do with their powers than going around killing people. If some mysterious figure kept showing up at the scene of traffic accidents and appearing to work miracle cures on the victims before the ambulance got there, and that person were to leave some sort of "I am God" note, I might give them some credence. But a killer is just an ally of entropy. And any human partner of entropy is a very minor member of the team. Were they really God they could overcome entropy and not be limited to being its servant. So this sniper is almost certainly not God, even if he says he is. ********************* I recently, for no good reason that I can recall, had this mental image of a newspaper appearing outside the main airlock of the International Space Station every morning, with some crew member having to suit up and go out to fetch it in. Maybe it would be named something like "The Space Times". But who would be bringing it? Who would be printing it? Try as they might, the astronauts never seem to catch a glimpse of the paper boy, or whatever species or gender the delivery agent might be. Perhaps space aliens are printing and delivering it as a way of opening communications with Earth. They may be having some success with getting the astronauts and such acquainted with them, but so far the various governments involved in the space station have been keeping the whole thing secret from the general public. You know the usual cliche excuses: It would cause panic if the news got out. So if you stop some random person on the street and ask them what they think about the morning paper that's delivered to the space station every day by space aliens, they'll just look at you funny. If there is such an alien newspaper being delivered to the space station, what kind of news would it contain? And, perhaps of more interest to some, what comic strips would it carry? ********************* Do animals go to the same Hereafter that humans go to? Beliefs vary. Some say they do, either individually or as some kind of spirit of the species. Assuming they do, will we find extinct species there? I would think the ones we once lived with, such as passenger pigeons and dodos, would indeed be represented. But what of those we know only from fossils, such as dinosaurs and trilobites? And what of those that may have once existed but which we know nothing of, because we haven't found their fossils yet or maybe they didn't fossilize well? Will we meet those as well? And will we need to rewrite some of the standard sayings about Heaven? For example, will Tyrannosaurus Rex lie down with the lion and the lamb? ********************* Some people at a party were talking about some new law that the Feds are supposedly considering for curbing copyright violations and fighting terrorism. It would basically give the gov't a back door into all new computers. I don't know how accurate their information was or how much was just the ravings of conspiracy theorists, but I think one question that should be asked the proponents of any such scheme is what happens when the more or less inevitable security leak occurs and somebody like Osama Bin Laden gets the keys and passwords. If the wrong people get control of such a "security" system, the effects might be comparable to when the Soviets got the Bomb. It might even be worse, if they resist the temptation to make a big public splash and instead engage in more subtle sabotage that we don't discover for some time. So I hope our decision-makers think long and hard before implementing anything of this sort. ********************* All the fuss about the ability of computer technology to allow people to circumvent copyrights on recorded music got me to thinking about the various business models writers and performers and publishers operate under. It seems to me that those who create and perform mainly for the love of it would be hurt the least. In general they've never made their living from their art, so they have little to lose. And they may have much to gain. They would still be able to draw paying audiences to their live performances, and as recordings of their work are passed from friend to friend they would reach many more people than they would have otherwise, especially if their work appeals to people with statistically unusual tastes or interests who can not be reached efficiently by conventional marketing techniques. The ones with the most to lose are the zillionaire mega-stars, the ones with their faces on every TV screen and their names on everybody's lips. Even if the performer was originally in it for love, the corporate power behind them is in it for the money. And much of that money comes from the sale of recordings. If sales of recordings stopped there might still be ticket revenue from live concerts, as well as money from movie roles and TV appearances and clothing labels and product endorsements and such, but a big part of the profits would be gone. And without record sales, would it still be profitable to spend money keeping those people in the public spotlight? Historically, isn't the mega-star business model fairly recent? Sound recording technology is only about a century old, as is radio. There were famous performers before that, but they performed live in concert halls where people made a special occasion of seeing and hearing them in person. Everyday music came from closer to the grass-roots level. So maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing for the business model of the Big Star remote from ordinary people's everyday reality to disappear. We would lose some ice-breakers between strangers who would no longer be able to start a conversation about this or that singer or band, secure in the knowledge that "everybody" has heard of them, but we might gain more in bonds of common interest between fans of lesser-known artists who are in it more for love. ********************* A coffee house some of us hang out in doesn't have a piano. I suspect the CIA could remedy that. They might start by getting a bunch of undercover agents to go hang out there and pretend to be customers. They keep bringing in new people until most of the "regulars" are CIA agents. Then one night after closing, perhaps on a holiday weekend when they know the staff and owner will be away for a day or two, a CIA locksmith picks the lock and disables the alarm. That lets them bring in the actual piano. They set it up in whatever part of the room they'd decided on, rearranging furniture as needed. If there isn't enough room for all the tables and such that had been there before, they make off with the excess. Then after scattering some song books and such around to make the piano look less out of place, they lock everything back up. When the staff opens up the next morning they'll probably notice the piano, and not remember it as having been there before. But then when the fake customers who are actually CIA agents start coming in, they will claim the piano was there all along. "Don't you remember? We sang barbershop quartet songs around it last Wednesday night." And there will be posters and flyers, printed by the CIA but supposedly left over from the event, for some kind of piano concert a few days ago. Eventually the staff and management will quit wondering about it and just sort of accept the piano as being there now, even if they don't really know how it got there. Then the CIA can start pulling out its fake customers, assuming there are still enough real customers around to keep the place in business. And we will then be able to enjoy piano music at our favorite hangout. ********************* Something reminds me of a movie cartoon in which the main character, a cat, commits suicide (gun to the head) at the end because "Now I've seen everything." That bit at the end was later censored, but some copies in circulation still have it. But be the censorship issue as it may, the cat was just plain wrong. That cartoon was made many years ago, possibly the 1950's or earlier, and there's been plenty of new stuff to see since then. He hadn't seen artificial satellites, the Moon landing, the JFK assassination, the Psychedelic Sixties or any of the subsequent social changes, any of Star Trek or Star Wars, or anything much to do with computers. And he hadn't see whatever futures we haven't seen yet. Or had he? Since he was a cartoon character, he may have been in lots of cartoons, including some science fiction things set in various futures. And don't forget other episodes set in Heaven and/or Hell. So maybe he had indeed seen everything, although perhaps not in the sequence the rest of us would have seen it in. This may merit further thought. Another question: According to a Web search, essentially the same gag (suicide after having "seen everything") has been used a number of times in different cartoons. Was there some real-world event that triggered it? Or did somebody just think it was a good gag worth recycling? ********************* Remember how science fiction back in the Forties and Fifties would sometime portray contact with another civilization, and someone would say "They're X number of years ahead of us"? X would usually be some specific number like 300 years, and it would always be one number. You never heard split numbers like "They're 400 years ahead of us in physics but only 100 years ahead in chemistry." But would that be the case? First, numbers in the range of a few hundred years seem implausible. The actual differences are likely to be on the order of a large fraction of a civilization's lifetime, possibly even long on the evolutionary scale if civilizations last long enough. That assumes, of course, that we are not approaching some fundamental limits to scientific and technological progress. And second, not everybody would progress at the same speed in all fields. So if we're within a few hundred years on most things, we might actually be ahead of them in a couple of areas. Then again, isn't it the nature of cliches to oversimplify things? ********************* The future is here, sitting in a car lot a few blocks from my apartment. Toyota has a hybrid vehicle, the Prius, which has a relatively small internal combustion engine assisted by a battery-powered electric motor. When full power is not needed the engine can turn the motor as a generator to keep the batteries charged. The boost from the electric motor allows the engine to be smaller, and since it operates only over a limited power and speed range it can be more efficient and put out much less pollution. Also, the electric motor acts as a generator during braking, to recapture kinetic energy that would otherwise be lost as heat in the brakes. Official gas mileage is 52 city, 45 highway, more than double the city mileage of quite a few other cars. Price is around $21,000. The future is here. Or is it? A handful or two of years hence, when that once-wondrous machine sits ignominiously in some other lot, half-hidden in a back corner as if ashamed of how small a price is scrawled across its windshield, will people gaze in awe at whatever is in the front row under the brightest bulbs, and tell each other, "The future is here"? ********************* Generations of Memories At the poetry reading, a woman half my age Waxes nostalgic about railroads: Fond memories of streamlined diesels. The steam-belching monsters of my childhood Are only the stuff of legend, As unreal as fire-breathing dragons. This leads me to wonder: When her children and grandchildren are doing poetry of their own, What version of this poem will she write? -- Tom Digby Original 09:04 10/07/2002 Edited 14:51 10/07/2002 Edited 14:19 10/10/2002 ********************* 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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