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 #120 New Moon of October 13, 2004 Contents copyright 2004 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. ********************* It's starting to look like Fall in Silicon Valley, even though the past couple of days have been among the warmest of the year, with temperatures in the upper 80's to lower 90's F (around 30 C), and even though most of the trees are still green. Yes, despite the summer-like weather, there are definite signs of Fall. The vacant lot on a nearby busy street has sprouted lights and inflatable play structures for the children as their parents choose from the many hundreds of pumpkins for sale. Likewise, the local supermarkets are featuring pumpkins, along with Halloween decorations and bags of Trick or Treat candy. I'm also seeing seasonal Halloween-only stores, in full bloom for now but doomed to wither away when November arrives. In residential areas I'm starting to see tombstones and witch cauldrons and skeletons in people's front yards, often festooned with spiderwebs or strings of lights. Halloween is nigh. Santa has also been spotted in some stores here and there, usually an aisle or two over from the witches and pumpkins, patiently (or perhaps impatiently) awaiting his turn in the spotlight. Oh yes, I almost forgot. There's one more sign of Fall: The days are getting shorter. ********************* "What do you think of cow-tipping?" "I figure maybe a dime for each quart of milk. That may seem low, but cows don't have much use for money." ********************* The science fiction club I was active in for many years when I was living in Los Angeles ( http://www.lasfs.org/ ) has been host to something called "APA-L". The "APA" in the name stands for "Amateur Press Association", of which there have been many in science fiction fandom. Those who grew up with computers can think of an apa as something like an email list or online forum, but based on paper instead of the Internet. Every so often (weekly in this case, but at other intervals for other apas) you write up whatever you want to say, including responses to what others have written previously, then print up and deliver the required number of copies, usually a few dozen. In return you get back one copy of everybody else's contribution. What reminded me of this is that APA-L is celebrating its fortieth anniversary later this month. It is by no means the oldest such entity around, but it was the first one I joined, when I first got into fandom back in the mid-Sixties. Later, when I got a computer and started joining online forums (first via dial-up modem, later via the Internet) I felt pretty much at home. Even though the online computer groups were in some ways a new medium of communication, in other ways they were very much like the paper-based apas I'd had decades of experience with by then. Much of what I'd learned, including how to disagree with others without starting a flame war, still applied. So as they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. ********************* Although most people who are not heavily into computers start any lists they make with item number one, the Major Arcana in the Tarot deck are numbered starting from zero. Are there other well-known zero-based series dating from pre-computer days, or is that pretty much It? ********************* At this late date it's probably not giving away too much of the plot to mention that in the film "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" there's a bit about a sort of space-going Noah's Ark, built by scientists. A giant rocket ship is seen being loaded with pairs of various sorts of animals. The idea was that Earth was about to be devastated and this shipload of animals would restore it to the state of some Eden, complete with a new Adam and Eve. Afterwards I got to thinking about potential problems with this. For example, what happens if, sometime during the first few days after release, one of your two mice gets eaten by one of your two cats or rattlesnakes or hawks or whatever? Do you have a Plan B, or are you just out of luck, mouse-wise? And what do your predators eat if your prey species are off-limits for a while? And even without the predator-prey problem, what of genetic bottlenecks and the resulting inbreeding? Will that hurt the ability of the various species to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by the post- disaster world? In the Bible Noah did OK with a seemingly simple setup, but he had Divine Help that modern scientists may well have to do without. If you were designing such a project today, and not expecting any sort of miracles, how would you do it, based on what we know now or are likely to know within the next couple of decades? Assume that you have access to pretty much unlimited robot help, but few if any humans, at least in the years right after the landing. ********************* Think of the trips to the grocery store you could save if all new homes had various flavors of pudding and gravy and salad dressings and ketchup and such piped in. ********************* There's been a debate on the WELL about the merits of closing some BART restrooms because of terrorism. A BART board member with training in law stated that safety was their first priority, and that their policy was to eliminate even the slightest risk. My thought was that if they really wanted to eliminate all risk, why were they running trains and letting people ride them? Maybe I should have replied, as someone with training in engineering, that there is no such thing as making something completely safe. With a certain amount of effort and passenger inconvenience you can (for example) eliminate half the risk. Then with somewhat greater effort and inconvenience you can eliminate half the remaining risk. And with truly stupendous effort you can eliminate half of whatever risk is left. And so on, with the effort and inconvenience growing by leaps and bounds with each step. But you'll never get rid of all the risk. And it's not like Zeno's Paradox where you do eventually get there because the time for each halving of the distance is itself being halved as you go. If anything, the effort gets greater with each step. So how should agencies like BART judge the acceptable degree of risk? ********************* A thought came to me a few nights back: Fake commuters. The government could hire thousands of people to get up every morning, drive an hour or two-hour loop around area freeways and streets during the morning commute, and then do it again in the opposite direction during the evening commute. This would make the rest of the public think the economy is picking up and more people have jobs. That in turn would give various corporate decision-makers more confidence, which would lead to increased hiring. Thus would we be led back into prosperity. Should I have suggested this to President Bush before the last debate? ********************* I saw something interesting a few days ago: A bumper sticker that read My child wasn't Citizen of the month [at some school] with the "n't" looking like it had been added by hand with a marking pen. Was this some parents expressing disappointment in their child, or an attempt at satire, or what? ********************* There's an organization called StarDate ( http://www.stardate.org/ ) that does short educational radio spots. One recent one (September 24) was about how if you were to shine a flashlight at Arcturus some few of the photons would eventually reach that star. Then most of those that didn't hit the star itself would continue onward for cosmologically large distances because there's essentially nothing to stop them. They may be too widely scattered for any technology we know of to detect them, but in theory they'd still be there. On the other hand, if you shine a flashlight at Vega there are gas and dust clouds that will act as a backstop, so your photons won't get very far, cosmologically speaking, even though "not very far" is still many times any Earthly distance. This wasn't really all that much in the way of new knowledge other than the database trivia of which stars are backstopped by dust clouds and which aren't, but it did give a definite "sense of wonder" feeling to think about it in those terms. ********************* Since Halloween is approaching, I might mention that a few mornings ago I had an interesting semi-dream as I was waking up: Some kind of space alien with a tool that might be something like a scythe, although it was kind of hard to tell. The creature was some other planet's version of Death, temporarily assisting ours because some catastrophe is about to be too much for our Death to handle alone. Maybe every planet with sentient life has its own version of Death and the Stork and other such hemidemisemigods, and maybe they occasionally help each other out when peaks of activity occur. So having some other planet's Death coming for you is an ill omen indeed, even worse than just you being dead. Since every planet (and indeed every culture on any one planet) has its own legends and symbols, they'll get a lot of the details wrong, assuming they make any effort at all in that direction. But hopefully they'll at least know how to get you to the right Hereafter. ********************* The incident that inspired this issue's poem also leads me to wonder what things from our culture will be treated in some future in ways that might make us laugh or cry were we to see them now. We probably won't know until we get there. ********************* Going to Seed On a mild October evening I browse the Halloween store, A place of gore and gravestones, spiderwebs and skeletons, costumes and cauldrons. A packet catches my eye, Stirring up memories of days almost forty years gone. It is a "HIPPIE KIT": A headband with the word "PEACE" on it, A large peace-sign neck pendant, And a pair of rose-colored glasses, All marked "Made in China". The tie-dyed T-shirt and longhaired wig are not included, But no doubt await me down another nearby aisle. As a plastic skull blares a tinny rendition of the well-known Funeral March Part of me dreams of taking a time machine back to those days of overwhelming optimism in the face of overwhelming adversity. Would those I would show it to laugh or cry to see all their grand world-changing dreams summed up in a pack of trinkets in a costume shop? To those who would cry I have words of consolation: While the bloom of the Flower Children has faded, their seeds continue to grow and spread, flowering anew into a rainbow of colors beyond what they could have ever imagined. -- Tom Digby written Tue Oct 5 20:54:34 PDT 2004 ********************* 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. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. When you receive an email confirmation request go to the URL it will give you. (If you're already on the list and want to get off there will be an Unsubscribe URL at the bottom of each list posting you receive.) To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I currently do that one manually. -- END --