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 #178 New Moon of June 22, 2009 Contents copyright 2009 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. ********************* This is the time of year when people with various non-standard sexual proclivities and identities (often lumped under the initials "GLBT" or "LGBT" or similar) hold their annual Pride celebrations. The exact dates vary from city to city, mainly to allow people to attend more than one community's events. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_parade The late June or early July dates mark the approximate anniversary of the Stonewall riots, when patrons of a gay bar in New York City started fighting back against police harassment and oppression. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots This year marks the fortieth anniversary. I didn't pay much attention to these events at the time. I was living in Los Angeles, three thousand miles away. And although I'd been reading a local gay newspaper, I wasn't really active in the gay community. Besides, the riots were just three weeks before the first Apollo moon landing. Since I was heavily into science fiction and science fiction fandom, that loomed larger in my mind. Coming out was a gradual process, at least for me. Being gay (or any of the other things on that list) was much less acceptable than it is now, and I was much younger, less conscious of my emotions, and less self-confident. I recall attending a meeting of a gay political organization. As the meeting was ending a bunch of us were standing on the sidewalk in front of the door. I felt some fear: What if someone who knew me were to happen by and see me there? The coming-out process took time, but eventually I was marching in local Gay Pride parades. ********************* There's an item in the news to the effect that Kodak will no longer make Kodachrome film. They cite a combination of reasons. For one thing, there's that newfangled digital photography. But even without that, there have been advances in film technology that make the original Kodachrome less viable in the marketplace. And yes, the news story does mention the song. ********************* There are lines in the Kodachrome song about various colors. But no matter how great the range of possible colors, any one small area of the film ends up as one color, often a rather dull and uninteresting one at that. Thus no part of the film achieves its full potential. This seeming waste is necessary in order for there to be an overall image. There's almost certainly some deep philosophical analogy that can be made here. ********************* Is it cheating to play "Flight of the Bumblebee" on an instrument like a slide trombone where you can turn the fast chromatic scale runs into slow glissandos? ********************* There's one more, possibly final, update on that fast-food restaurant I mentioned back in SS #172 and again in #177 that had the sign about how their Secret Ingredient was Quality, except that some of the letters had fallen off the sign. As of early June the last of the plastic letters are gone. No longer does the sign proclaim their Secret Ingredient to be "Qualit" or "Quail" or "Qua". Now there's just a blank space between the "Secret Ingredient" heading and the rest of the spiel. It's not total nonsense, since there's something at the end about quality being the secret ingredient, so leaving the sign that way makes some sense. But it took them something like six months from when the letters started disappearing to finally take some action. ********************* The local paper has announced that they will be expanding their weekly TV section while also unbundling it from the normal subscription. After a short free-sample trial period it will be an extra-cost option, fifty cents a week. For those who do subscribe it will be delivered with the Sunday paper, more or less the way it is now. I don't plan to take the offer, since I'm not into TV or celebrity gossip. But it did get me to wondering if further unbundling will follow, like the airlines are doing with meals and checked baggage and such. Will other sections like Sports or Comics be split off in the future? I don't expect that to happen immediately because giving different customers different sections of the paper represents a significant change to their delivery methods, and it may take some time to get the bugs out of the system. But once this is working smoothly with the TV section it should be relatively easy to extend it to other sections. So more unbundling seems likely to come eventually. If and when it does happen, I'll probably say Yes to the comics and movie reviews and Ann Landers and such, but No to the sports section. ********************* When my grandmother wanted to play a record on her Victrola, she had to turn the crank to wind up the spring, put the record on the turntable, verify that the needle was OK and replace it if not, move the control lever from Stop to Go, and put the needle down into the groove at the start of the record. It would then play. The stereo setup I had in the Sixties was about as simple. There was no spring to wind up and I didn't have to keep replacing needles, but I did have to turn an amplifier on and make sure the Phono-AM-FM-Aux switch was set to Phono. Now comes the time to try out the CD player on my new computer system. I put the coaster on the cup holder, close the tray, and launch the CD player software. Once I've done that it should play (or offer to play) the CD, right? Apparently not. Instead, it wants me to start a "catalog" of some sort of "collection" of "playlists". That may be all well and good eventually, but it's not what I want to do right now. What I want to do right now is just play the CD that's in the drive. Is there a menu option for that? I bumble around for a while in a forest of menus, without much luck. There are things in the menu that sort of look like they might lead to a way to play the CD, but none of them seem to live up to that promise. I try reading the help, but there's no manual for that player, or the manual didn't get downloaded, or something. The software provider's Web site mentions a different player that used to be the default. I download that and try it. This time I get an error message about a missing back-end software module. I download that and try again. Success! The CD plays. I suppose I should have gone back and given that first player another try, to see if that missing back-end module was what was keeping it from offering to play the CD. But it was getting late, so I called it a night. Maybe I'll try that player again some other time. And maybe I'll even decide to set up some sort of catalog eventually. Maybe. But it's not high on my list of stuff to do. Sometimes it's best to just stick to the basics. ********************* Has NASA considered recruiting zombies and vampires and such as astronauts? If undeath support is easier to provide than life support, there might be a significant cost saving. ********************* The bit about the demise of Kodachrome got me to looking up film and such on Wikipedia. That led me to articles on various printing technologies, such as the hectograph, spirit duplication ("Ditto"), and the mimeograph, as well as bluelines and blueprints. There's even a long list of duplicating technologies, many of which I'd never heard of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_duplicating_processes But there was nothing about using buzzards. It should be fairly simple. You have your original, you have a stack of blank paper for your copies, and you have a buzzard. Then you sit down and figure out what to do next. There seems to be a problem with that last step, figuring out what to do next. As far as I know, no one, including me, has solved it. So maybe that's why Wikipedia doesn't seem to say much about using buzzards to make copies of documents. ********************* Now and again I've heard claims that some countries with single-payer health systems ration treatments. Some official agency decides who does or doesn't get treated for certain conditions. In some of these places, if they decide not to offer treatment, it's illegal for you to try to get it anyway, even if you can afford to pay for it yourself. Other places do let those who can afford it make their own arrangements, while those who can't are still out of luck. To the degree these claims may be valid, I think this is a sign of the same underlying problem we have: We know how to do more than we have the resources to do. Time was when that wasn't the case. Most medical treatments were more or less affordable. Even if a given individual couldn't pay, their insurance (private or otherwise) could. The other side of that coin was that there were quite a few conditions for which there was no known effective treatment. The best anyone could do was to try to make the patient comfortable until the inevitable end. In fact, that was the case with most serious medical problems. Then as technology advanced we figured out how to build zillion-dollar testers and scanners and life-support machines of various kinds and how to manufacture all sorts of very difficult-to-make (= expensive) chemical compounds. Even if a given drug doesn't cost all that much to make, the process of testing it to verify that it is indeed worth making can cost millions of dollars, and those costs need to be recovered. So now when somebody develops a condition that used to be considered hopeless, there's a good chance that it can be treated. But the cost of that treatment may be a significant fraction of the average person's lifetime earnings. Thus we as a society cannot afford to care for every patient we know how to care for. Someone has to decide which individuals are or are not "worth saving". Legislating new kinds of medical insurance or other forms of welfare payments won't solve the basic problem, although they may sweep it under the rug for a while. The only real solution will come, if it comes at all, with further advances in technology that eventually do to the costs of medical treatment what technology has already done to the costs of doing things like making home movies (with sound) and sending copies to all your friends. There is probably no good short-term solution. ********************* It's been forty years since rioting drag queens at a gay bar in New York triggered what eventually became the GLBT Pride movement. The world has changed a lot since then. This is from way back when. To Be a Martian Let me tell you a little of what it feels like To be a Martian, One of the millions exiled to Earth and passing as human, All shapes, all sizes, all colors. I cannot tell you the reason we were sent here Except that we mean no harm And that nothing could be further from the truth Than the endlessly repeated tales of Horrors from the Red Planet. Although that's an annoyance, What really hurts is having to hold my tongue When someone I consider a friend Starts bad-mouthing Martians And telling how he would prove his loyalty to Earth By tearing tentacle from slimy tentacle Anything he meets That looks like his idea of a Martian. Even that would be bearable Except that most Martians, All but a few who venture To congregate in desolate places, Are disguised so well That they are seldom known even to one another. And there is a tradition, As old as the Martian race And established with good reason, That a Martian may love Only another Martian. Thomas G. Digby written 0220 hr 1/20/70 typed 0355 hr 5/07/77 entered 2205 hr 4/12/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --