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 #188 New Moon of April 14, 2010 Contents copyright 2010 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. ********************* After all that spring-like weather I wrote about last time, we had a cool rainy spell. My first reaction is to say it's just "April Showers", but then a look at the weather statistics for this area shows that April is one of the less rainy months, on average. The area I grew up in is different, but April is not an especially rainy month there either. Apparently the phenomenon is significant in the British Isles, but that's a long way from California. I just took a look at my copy of the sheet music for the song "April Showers" and found no disclaimers about April not necessarily being a rainy month everywhere in any given year. Is this something I should complain to the Truth in Advertising people about? ********************* No, the sheet music for the song "April Showers" does not contain any warranties or disclaimers or other legalese, other than a copyright notice dated 1921. It does say the song appeared in a Broadway musical named "Bombo", starring Al Jolson. The Wikipedia article on that play has a list of songs, including "April Showers" and two others I recognized: "California, Here I Come" and "Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye)". It also listed another two dozen I didn't recognize. I guess that just goes to show how fleeting fame can be. ********************* "See a penny, pick it up, All the day you'll have good luck. See a penny, let it lay, You'll have bad luck all the day." I've heard that little rhyme a number of times over the years. But now I'm wondering what kind of luck you're supposed to have if you see a penny and just sweep it up and throw it in the garbage. One evening a while back I was eating at a local fast-food place. It was starting to get close to closing time, and someone was sweeping the floor. As the person got close to me I noticed a penny lying in her path. Would she pick it up? No, she just swept it into the dustpan along with the food crumbs and bits of paper and other detritus. Should she have saved it? If it takes five seconds to pick up a penny, that's $7.20 per hour. She's probably making more than that, even before you count medical and other benefits and overhead and such. So the number-crunchers might well say it isn't worth it. What if she were to pick it up and, instead of turning it in, keep it? That would, at least in theory, raise ethical questions. So it may still be best to let it go. You might be able to make a case for salvaging it on the grounds of not dumping toxic metals into the environment. But sorting that out is the job of the people at the recycling center, where all local refuse is taken. Besides, is a penny worth getting one's hands all dirty for? All in all, this whole incident may be an argument for abolishing the penny. After all, if they're not worth picking up off the floor, why bother making them? ********************* I'm reminded of another old pop song, "Pennies from Heaven", from the 1936 movie of the same name starring Bing Crosby. Back when the song first came out the penny was worth something. But now instead of singing about pennies, people throw them in the garbage. On the back of the sheet music are the first lines of a number of other songs, none of which look familiar to me. At the bottom it says "Get them for your piano, talking machine, or player piano." Not a peep about the iPad. Digital media were not on Tin Pan Alley's radar back then. But then radar wasn't on Tin Pan Alley's radar yet either. "Radar" wasn't even a word yet, even though scientists had been experimenting with the basic concepts for years. ********************* Speaking of "radar" not being a word before radar was invented, someone I know who does copy editing asked for people's opinions on how they tell whether something is or is not a word. Most of those who replied seemed to take the question to mean what words (or word-like things) are acceptable for use in various contexts. To me "That's not a word" is what school teachers have traditionally said about word-like things they don't consider acceptable in formal speech or writing. The prime example of such non-words is "ain't". Although "ain't" has an agreed-upon spelling, pronunciation (with some leeway for different accents), and meaning, it somehow has been denied membership in the Word Club. Now if someone were to try to say something like "It's time to get going," but instead of saying the word "time" were to point to a clock, it might be appropriate for the teacher to point to the clock and say "that's not a word." But that kind of thing seldom happens in real life, at least among the people I hang out with. It might be interesting to write up an argument between a teacher and a mime, where the mime keeps trying to act out some concept and the teacher keeps saying "That's not a word," but I don't feel like doing it myself, at least not right now. And even if I did, what if I went to all that work to write it up and it turned out not to be all that funny? Or if it's for a print publication, think of a rebus where the copy editor keeps objecting that the various images are not words. Closer to the original question, when is a given word (or non-word) acceptable or not acceptable? I'm an engineer, not a copy editor, so my opinions may not agree with "official" copy-editor wisdom, but I'd say that a word (or functional equivalent) is acceptable if it is understood by the target audience, conveys the desired meanings, and does not convey significant undesired meanings or have other undesired effects. For an example of an undesired meaning, while a statement like "Them studies say global warming ain't no big deal" may convey the author's opinion of global warming (give or take logical quibbles on the double negative), in a formal setting it would also mark the writer as lacking education or otherwise being an outsider. On the other hand, that same sentence might be OK in a humorous context. For an example of other undesired effects, some words can put the writer or publisher in physical danger or lead to other kinds of trouble (racial slurs, "four-letter words", shouting "fire" in a theater, etc.). Again, even those may be OK if the intent is to become a martyr or make a test case or something of that sort. So who decides and how? In some contexts there are designated authorities that would have the final word. Even though English usage is not regulated by any government body the way some other languages are, some technical standards bodies publish prescriptive dictionaries of their jargon. Since these tend to be in fields where the consequences of a misunderstanding can be severe, it is probably best to follow any such authorities that are applicable. Where that doesn't apply, I would go with whatever tradition is relevant, along with common sense. ********************* Once when I was a child one of my playmates claimed that the opposite of "dog" was "cat". I wasn't old enough to really think through an answer, especially one about how complex concepts sort of do or don't apply on different levels. Now something analogous popped into my head: "The opposite of 'Silicon Soapware' is 'Twitter'." Both statements may be true on some levels but aren't true on others. Just as dogs and cats are both quadrupedal mammals, Silicon Soapware and Twitter feeds are things you can choose to follow over the Internet. So in that sense they're the same rather than opposites. But in other ways they're quite different. And in some of those ways they approach being opposites. Just one of those things to think about. ********************* Speaking of opposites of things, I recently saw a list of "antipopes". No, an antipope is not a Pope made out of antimatter, much as the science-fiction side of me might like that. It has something to do with the politics of how the Pope is selected. Even if the antimatter version would be more interesting, most antipopes lived hundreds of years ago, back when nobody even knew what antimatter was, let alone how to make it. In fact, even now making anything more just just a few loose atoms out of antimatter is still beyond our technology. So we're not likely to see an antimatter antipope any time soon. Of course that doesn't mean it's not theoretically possible. We just have to figure out what all the various molecules in a living cell do, and how to create and manipulate antimatter versions of them. Then we need to figure out stuff like how brain neurons create personalities, and then encode the traits we want into neurons and synapses and such. Once we've done that we can have a "real" antipope, at least as far as appearances are concerned. The theological implications, as well as budgeting and justification for the project, will be left as an exercise for the reader. ********************* What with Easter a couple of weeks ago, some people on the list got to discussing what greetings were or were not appropriate for other religious holidays that happen to fall around the same time of year. That leads to a question I've wondered about off and on for years: Why isn't "Season's Greetings" used year-round for everything? Since it doesn't explicitly mention any particular season or any particular occasion or any particular emotion there isn't much that it would be inappropriate for. So why is it used only for holidays that come at roughly the same time as Christmas? ********************* This sort of feels like the mood I was in putting this issue together: Incident Along Fantasy Way 0830 hr 7/30/74 Arithmetic Lesson Arithmetic along Fantasy Way is Different. You CAN add apples and oranges. TEACHER: "What do you get when you add coaches and pumpkins?" "Cinderella!" the class shouts back. "But what else?" Everybody talking at once: "You can turn those old junk cars into ..." "But you'll get rotten pumpkins!" "But they're still biodegradable!" "Make costumes for cars at Halloween!" "And string lights on them at Christmas!" "And hide them at Easter!" Arithmetic along Fantasy Way is Different. There are no wrong answers. Thomas G. Digby written 0830 hr 7/30/74 entered 2125 hr 2/08/92 ********************* 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. 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