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 #204 New Moon of July 30, 2011 Contents copyright 2011 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. ********************* We're coming up on the Pagan holiday of Lammas, which is sort of the beginning of the end of summer, or the first grain harvest, or something similar, depending on what part of Europe the people you talk to about it came from. Since the climate varies from place to place, things like planting and harvest happen on different dates in different places. So the original meanings of the old traditions vary from group to group. What may be unique about Lammas is that it is the only one of the eight major holidays ("Sabbats") celebrated by Pagans in the US that does not have a counterpart in American popular culture. The other seven sort of correspond to Halloween, Groundhog Day, May Day, and the two Equinoxes and two Solstices you probably read about in science class in school. These eight Sabbats are approximately equally spaced around the year, like spokes of a wheel, roughly a month and a half apart. Just as Halloween is six months away from May Day, Lammas is six months away from Groundhog Day, with these four alternating with the Solstices and Equinoxes. Unlike the others, Lammas doesn't seem to correspond to anything in American culture, except maybe "Back to School" sales in the stores. And no, I don't know of anyone who celebrates that aspect of it. But knowing how diverse Pagans are, I wouldn't be surprised if someone somewhere is doing just that. ********************* Although the CRT monitor for this computer still sort of worked, I finally replaced it with a new flat-screen model. It's a big improvement. Text is much more readable, even if the actual letters are a little smaller. This is especially true of sites that use some medium-dark text color on a dark background. Now I can read it without having to select it to make it visible. There are also improvements in images, especially in the dimly-lit portions. I also spent a couple of hours cleaning up the area around the computer. It needed it. At some point during the changeover process I got to thinking about how a CRT is like a bottle. That in turn led to thoughts of putting a genie in one. Somehow it doesn't seem really practical. For one thing, a genie in a CRT seems likely to be noticed during production testing, assuming it had enough physical substance to interfere with the electron beam. And if that happened, it would probably cause that unit to be rejected. So it might well never get out of the factory, unless they're putting genies in every CRT as a standard production thing. Or is that how a CRT actually works? Does every CRT need a genie inside? If that were the case I think I would have heard about it back in engineering school. I don't think that kind of secret could have been kept that well for that long. But be that as it may, maybe the genie is staying hidden for now, and won't be noticed until the CRT is eventually broken at a dump or recycling center or some such. So then who does it give the three wishes to? Some employee of the recycling place? Is this something the people at those facilities have gotten used to by now? Do they expect the occasional genie as a fringe benefit of the job? And why would anyone put a genie into a CRT in the first place? I would think that would be more difficult than putting it into a more traditional bottle. For example, what's to keep the genie from escaping when they pump the air out of the CRT? And even if someone has figured out a way to do this, why would they bother when traditional bottles are available and seem to hold genies fairly well? Perhaps someone has put a genie in one CRT somewhere as a sort of contest, like giving away scratch-and-win tickets or some such? "Break that old CRT and win three wishes!" or something similar? Possibly, but they would probably want people to know about it, wouldn't they? So why haven't I seen it advertised? That may be because I don't watch enough TV. And I don't think the chances of it happening are high enough to be worth staring at a TV screen all day just in case it shows up. So even if there is a genie in my old CRT monitor, some anonymous person at the recycle place will probably end up getting those three wishes. ********************* In an earlier draft of the above I had a line about how strange things happen in this world, and even stranger things happen in other worlds. But then I got to thinking. Isn't the statement that strange things happen in any given world really a statement about how that world's statistics of various kinds of events are distributed? If something happens frequently in World X, then it isn't really strange there no matter how strange it would seem to us. And if something is known never to happen there then it's not one of the things that happens, strange or otherwise. So in any given world, the statement "Strange things happen in this world" may really mean that the statistical distribution of things that happen there has a long tail of things that happen but only very seldom, or maybe they so seldom happen that nobody really knows if they ever actually happen or not. This may also imply that the inhabitants of that world don't really know everything that can or can't happen there. They may think they know, but they'd be wrong. The line would not apply in a world where it was known that some fairly small set of things happened frequently while nothing not on the list ever happened. Likewise, in a world where everything happened equally often it would not apply either. In one case strange things would not happen, while in the other nothing that happened would be strange. Chaotic, maybe. Strange, no. I don't think I would do too well in either one of those places. But that may just be because I'm used to this world, where at least some people think that strange things seem to happen. ********************* I've been seeing the word "trope" a lot lately, mainly in connection with ideas and themes in science fiction and fantasy stories. The word itself, which according to my dictionary comes from a Greek root meaning "turn" and is related to words like "tropical" and "tropism", has been around for a long time in various scholarly contexts (look it up in Wikipedia for a number of examples). But it seems to be a relative newcomer to popular culture. I don't recall when I first saw it, but it feels like it was only a few years ago. Does anyone know more about when or how or why it escaped from academia? ********************* Speaking of tropes, do you remember when mutants with superhuman powers were all the rage in science fiction? The field was full of them back in the 1950's and 60's, possibly related to concerns about radioactive fallout from nuclear testing, along with fears of possible nuclear war. The plots of the various stories differed in how many mutants there were, the degree to which they were known to and/or accepted by "normal" humans, and so on. Although I don't have any examples handy, I'm fairly certain there were some in which the mutants somehow found one another and banded together, staying more or less hidden from "normal" people. Take some stories in this last category, change the word "mutant" to "wizard" and a few other words like "telepathy" and "telekinesis" to something that sounds more like magic, and you have something close to the Harry Potter universe. Is there any significance to this, or is it just happenstance? ********************* Someone I know was grousing about some inept computer administrator at work doing inept things with people's passwords. That got me to thinking. I can think of one possible advantage to having weak password security: Deniability. Imagine what almost any public figure caught up in a scandal involving email or computer files might say when the news breaks: "Nope. I didn't do it. Somebody must have gotten hold of my password and now they're trying to make me look bad. As you may know, my staff members and I have trouble remembering passwords. So we keep them written down all over the place, disguised as messages and grocery lists and such so nobody will know they're passwords. But now somebody must have figured it out. So we may need to rethink our security procedures. And whatever it is that we're accused of, we didn't do it." ********************* Incident Along Fantasy Way 0145 hr 7/28/74 Discount Planets "DISCOUNT PLANETS" says the sign that caught my eye And I stand in front of the place, torn by indecision. On the one hand I am terribly late to somewhere or other And if I linger I will be later still. But stores, like everything and everybody else along and about this street, Are compelled always to wander So there may be no such thing as "I'll come back later." -- Thomas G. Digby written 0145 hr 7/28/74 entered 2210 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. 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 --