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 #101 New Moon of April 1, 2003 Contents copyright 2003 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. ********************* You've probably all heard the little rhyme about what boys and girls are made of: Sugar and spice and everything nice for girls, but snips and snails and puppy-dog tails for boys. Problem is, it doesn't cover all the bases. Nowadays, what with growing public acceptance of alternative sexualities, I'm wondering about the transgendered, hermaphrodites, third-gender shamans, and other such new categories, many of which I probably haven't even heard of yet. What are they made of? And what other as yet unknown genders might be possible? I think it depends on what combinations of ingredients are allowed. Are we limited to the traditional six ingredients, in a strict format of "One from Column A, one from Column B, and one from Column C"? If so, then there are only eight possibilities. If, on the other hand, one can have any combination of any or all of the six then there are sixty-four possible mixes, although the one with no ingredients may not be very interesting. Or maybe we need exactly three of the six, but are free to choose any three. There are twenty ways to do that. And are other ingredients allowed? If so, do they have to rhyme with the ones they replace? Do they have to have similar initial consonants so as to preserve alliteration? We just don't know. We also don't know the relative proportions of the various items, and what effect that has. Clearly, more research is needed, on several fronts. First, we need to gather more data. Are all girls really made of sugar and spice and everything nice, with all boys being made of snips and snails and puppy-dog tails, or are there some in whom these ingredients differ? And if the ingredients do vary, are the variations associated with any observable physiological or behavioral traits? Unfortunately, we do not yet have the technology to screen large numbers of people for this kind of thing. So before we can amass a statistically significant database we need to develop better analysis techniques and equipment. The vast pool of unemployed talent in Silicon Valley might be able to accomplish this, but they would need funding. And in the current climate of recession plus war, funding may be difficult to get. Another possible line of research might involve animal models. That would let us do experiments that would not be allowed on humans. But do we know what male and female mice or guinea pigs or whatever are made of? And again, we have the problem of funding. Perhaps we can take advantage of the war situation: If, for example, one combatant were to spray the other side's troops with Everything Nice, would the victims follow the gender stereotype and become less inclined to fight? In the event of an Everything Nice attack, would Puppy-Dog Tails be an effective antidote? Even if we are prohibited by the Geneva Convention from using this type of weapon, we still need to be able to defend against it if others use it on us. So research in this area is desperately needed, on a wartime crash-priority basis. I'm just an engineer, with no experience in writing grant applications or organizing scientific research projects. So if you're experienced in those areas and want to help, please contact me. ********************* "I laughed so hard I snorted coffee out of my nose all over the keyboard. And that was very odd, because I was drinking Pepsi." ********************* I have an old spring-wound alarm clock that seems to have gone wonky. I hadn't used it for a while, and after I took it out of storage and wound it up it started gaining an hour or more a day. But it just occurred to me that it may not actually be broken. Maybe what's really happened is that the rotation of the Earth has slowed, and They are keeping it secret and beaming some kind of hidden signals to slow down all the electronic clocks and watches in the world to match. People may notice that their work day seems to drag on longer, but nobody has any real evidence to point to because there are so few spring-wound non-electronic clocks left. So does anybody else reading this have a spring-wound non-electronic clock? If so, does it agree with your electronic timepieces? ********************* Speaking of technologies that were common in years past but are now vanishing, how many of you have pressure cookers in your kitchens? How many of your parents or grandparents had them? There was sort of a fad for pressure cookers around the early 1950's. My parents had one, and there were a fair number of jokes about them in the funny papers and on TV situation comedies. And then they sort of faded from use and from public consciousness. I recall seeing my parents using the bottom part as just another ordinary pot, but I don't recall seeing it used as a pressure cooker once the novelty of it wore off. So why did pressure cookers fade from home kitchens? Safety? Despite jokes about them blowing up, I suspect there was really little danger since the one we had did have redundant safety features. And they could have become even safer over time had the technology remained in demand. I suspect the real reason was that the main benefit, being able to cook some foods somewhat faster, was fairly minor compared to the cost and the hassle. Also, you couldn't stir foods while cooking, and you couldn't watch while the cooking was going on. And they were only good for things you wanted to boil or steam. You couldn't use them for baking or frying, or defrosting processed frozen foods like those newfangled TV dinners. I think their limited applicability was what did them in. They're still used in commercial food processing, but they were too specialized to appeal to very many homemakers. Microwave ovens, on the other hand, were useful for more different types of tasks and were simpler to deal with. And even though there are real dangers if too much microwave energy escapes from the oven, the hazards are more abstract and harder to portray in situation comedies than explosions with food all over the kitchen ceiling. And now, with the market going more and more to processed foods and fewer people cooking from scratch, there is even less need for pressure cookers in the home. There will probably always be a few people using them for specialized tasks like home canning, but they're unlikely to ever become common again. ********************* Thoughts of how pressure cookers failed to catch on among American homemakers leads me to think of other technologies we'll probably never see in the home. One that comes to mind is tiny x-ray machines at the dinner table so you can x-ray your fish for bones, bite by bite. You could do other things with it as well, such as finding out which chocolates have nut centers and which don't. But even with those other uses, it'll probably never catch on. It would be expensive to develop, especially with having to put in enough safety features to satisfy the gov't, and even if you can make it safe much of the public is paranoid about "radiation". Since the benefits of the device are rather small compared to the costs, it will probably never come to the mass market. So that's another item I probably shouldn't be trying to push as a Silicon Valley start-up. ********************* There's also the bit of not-too-promising technology I dreamed about one night recently. I had a mitten whose palm area was full of heating elements so I could cook food just by holding or touching it. There was insulation inside under the heaters so my hands wouldn't get too hot. I think I could also burn lumps of coal that way. In the dream I thought this was an old idea I'd thought of previously, but that seeming memory may have also been part of the dream. In any event, I suspect the commercial potential is quite limited, not worth trying to seek out major investors for. ********************* We just had Equinox a week or two ago. Winter is winding down and spring is springing forth. While there may still be ice in colder parts of the country, it's on its way out. And the art piece of sculptured ice skaters that graced a little parkway near here during the holidays is long gone. All this somehow got me to wondering about a comic-book cliche: Some ice-skaters or fishermen or some such go out on a frozen lake. Near the middle of the lake is a sign: DANGER -- THIN ICE. Someone ventures too close to the sign, whereupon the ice breaks and they fall in, or suffer some other comic-book fate. This got me to wondering about that THIN ICE sign. How does the person who puts it up every winter avoid the same fate as the skaters who venture too near it later on? Or does he avoid it? Falling in may not be all that bad if you know in advance when it's going to happen, so they can have the Rescue Squad and fresh dry clothes and all that good stuff waiting. Thing is, you never see the THIN ICE sign being put up, so there's no way of knowing how it's done. And what happens later on in spring when the ice is almost completely gone? Does someone somehow take the sign and put it in storage for the summer? Or is it just left to sink when the ice finally melts, with a new sign being put up every year? If it's just left there, then as the centuries pass won't the lake eventually fill up with THIN ICE signs? Or maybe they take a middle course: Let the sign sink, but then sometime around late summer or early fall, just before the lake starts to freeze again, send a diver down to retrieve it. That would minimize the time they would need to pay for storage space for it. So does anybody know how they really do it? ********************* There's a street near here that reminds me of some Fifties and early Sixties science fiction. It's a long block of duplexes, all apparently built by one developer. There are three or four different front facades, combined in various ways with three or four different designs for the rest of the building, so that no two of the ten or so houses are exactly alike. But the overall effect is still one of cookie-cutter conformity. As I said, I'm reminded of science fiction from the Fifties and early Sixties where a common theme was persecution of whoever was Different from "Normal". Maybe the neighbors and/or the authorities thought the protagonist was a Communist or something when in reality he was just someone who liked to think too much. Or maybe he had better things to do with his money than buy all the latest consumer status symbols. Or he didn't watch enough TV and didn't like the top-rated shows. Be the details as they may, if you dared deviate from the norm, you were likely to end up in Big Trouble. This conformity theme may not have been prominent in the best-selling novels of the time, but it did show up in quite a few short stories in the science fiction magazines. Then all that pent-up individualism burst free into the Psychedelic Sixties. So what themes in today's science fiction might be pointing to the next big wave of social change? ********************* Alternate Routes He was crazy. We all knew that. All his talk of strange exotic lands he would someday run away to proved it, Since it was well known That here was the only place there was. Still, he could be quite convincing So we had to keep reminding ourselves That he was crazy. Further proof: One night late, driving home from a party or something, As he approached the curve in the road We saw him signal to turn right. He tried to explain about another road to the left They had taught us not to see But that only proved How crazy he was. And so we went, Being careful not to look too hard as we passed the curve, Until One night late, driving home from a party or something, As he approached the curve in the road We saw him signal to turn left And vanish. We all stood there, Telling each other that we could see, Way down in the canyon, His flaming wreckage. I felt it best not to mention That to me the faint red glow Looked more like tail lights Dwindling toward the horizon. Thomas G. Digby written 0420 hr 5/17/80 entered 2115 hr 2/08/92 ********************* 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. 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