SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                         = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us 

                    http://www.well.com/user/bubbles/

                                Issue #51
                       New Moon of March 17, 1999


Contents copyright 1999 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of 
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                          *********************

It's about time.  That is, this issue is late, again mostly because of 
work, but it's also about time in that we've just had the Equinox and 
we're coming up on Daylight Saving in a couple of weeks, and I just sort 
of happen to have a bunch of time-related items handy.  


                          *********************

Daylight Saving time will be upon us soon.  That reminds me of the idea 
of slicing the Earth in half along the Equator, inserting a giant Lazy 
Susan bearing, and rotating whichever hemisphere is going into Summer 
westward relative to the Winter one, back and forth every year.  No more 
fumbling around resetting clocks.  As your hemisphere moves westward for 
Summer, sunset will come later because of the change in longitude, while 
the time of sunrise will stay roughly constant, at least in middle 
latitudes.  So we can get the benefits of Daylight Saving (more evening 
light) without the hassles of upsetting everybody's schedule.  

Will there be side effects?  Since we can spread the adjustment out over 
a couple of months each Spring and Fall most people won't notice any 
movement, although it might affect ocean tides and such.  There might 
also be an effect on weather patterns, and on circadian rhythms of some 
animals.  But we can have a detailed Environmental Impact Report done up 
later, after the idea has gotten enough acceptance for funding to start 
coming in.  

Speaking of funding, we'll need to budget a fair amount of money for 
engineering.  Slicing the Earth in half requires a LOT of digging, and it 
has to be done quietly so as not to disturb people with construction 
noise, vibration, etc.  And whatever the bearing is made of, it will most 
likely be lubricated by molten magma from the mantle, perhaps with some 
seawater mixed in.  And don't forget the machinery to do the moving.  
These are not standard off-the-shelf items.  

Then there are the political questions, especially in countries like 
Brazil that sit astride the Equator.  And don't forget religions that may 
be impacted when the direction to holy places like Mecca keeps changing. 

The idea has a long way to go.  We'll probably need a committee just to 
figure out what kind of study committees we need to do the actual 
figuring out of whatever needs to be figured out.  So we'll probably have 
to handle this year's switch to Daylight Saving the old-fashioned way.


                          *********************

Unbeknownst to them, the State Lottery officials had built their new 
Betting Office right next door to a hidden field office of the Time 
Patrol.  TP policy forbade taking advantage of that situation, but some 
officers found the temptation irresistible. 


                          *********************

Two magic-users are talking.  One is showing off a new drum.  

"It's a Memory Drum.  You play it in the Sacred Circle and it helps you 
remember things you'd forgotten."  

"Sounds useful.  How does it work?"  

"You know how rhythmic drumming sets up psychic standing waves all up and 
down the time-stream.  Well, I just took a standard prognostication spell 
and reversed a couple of the terms so the main nodes are in the past 
rather than the future.  I also set it to look within one's own mind 
rather than out into the world.  So it opens the way to lost memories."  

"But why do you need a special drum for that?"  

"You don't really.  You can drum the memory spell on just about any drum 
you happen to have handy.  But my Memory Drum is specially consecrated 
for memory work, so the magic is stronger and you have a better chance of 
success."  

"Where did you get the idea?"  

"Couple of things.  I'd forgotten something and I'd been trying to 
remember what I'd forgotten, and one of my techno-using friends happened 
to mention that computers used to use Memory Drums.  So I took it from 
there."  

"So this is an adaptation of computer technology?"  

"Not really.  I couldn't understand his description of the computer 
Memory Drum, so I had to pretty much work my version out from scratch.  
So everything except the initial inspiration is mine."  

"I've heard of Memory Drums in computers, but they're there to help the 
computer remember.  Probably won't work for people at all."  

"That would explain why his descriptions didn't make sense to me.  But 
even so, I think I got something pretty useful out of all this." 

And they might go on about how computers seem to have switched from drums 
to cymbals or gongs or something disk-shaped that the magic-users don't 
understand at all, with another person saying something about a rotating 
serving platter full of little bits of lodestone.  Each bit can only 
answer one Yes-No question, but they have thousands of thousands of 
thousands of them to work with.  And even though it would seem impossible 
to pile that many bits of lodestone onto a banquet platter and then find 
anything useful in the pile, it evidently works for computers.  More 
evidence of the great gulf between computers and people.  

And the person with the drum then acknowledges that his tech-user friend 
did teach him a lot about standing waves and resonances and such.  That 
has helped a great deal in making spells in general, not just the Memory 
Drum spell.  

There's also mention of how some tech-users are starting to learn magic, 
just as some magic-users are starting to learn tech stuff.  Prophecies 
are that those who truly master both will be more powerful than anything 
the world has yet seen.  


                          *********************

And along with all the time-related stuff this issue I'm reminded that 
because of continental drift a day in the Americas is maybe a third of a 
microsecond longer than a day in Europe.  

The Atlantic is getting wider at the rate of maybe a tenth of a 
millimeter per day, or a little over an inch a year.  The speed of 
Earth's rotation at middle latitudes is roughly the speed of sound, or 
around 300 meters per second.  That's 0.3 millimeters per microsecond.  
So if you have sundials on both sides of the Atlantic, the American one 
will drift out of calibration relative to the European one at the rate of 
a few hundred nanoseconds per day.  

If we still went by local solar time the difference would amount to a 
second every eight or ten thousand years or so.  We might adjust by 
throwing in an extra leap second relative to the Europeans.  But with our 
modern system of hourly time zones, we'll probably keep the same leap 
seconds everybody else uses and just adjust the time zone boundaries to 
stay more or less in the same place relative to Greenwich as the land 
moves under them.  


                          *********************

                                TIME GUM


If you've always wanted to roam the corridors of time,
To meet Shakespeare,
Attend the original Olympics,
Or bumble around with dinosaurs,
And you're the kind of person who prefers hiking to driving,
Then I recommend
Time Gum.

Some flavors let you chew your way straight into the past
That you've always read about in history books
While others take you crookedly into other pasts
Of dragons
And wizards
And fairy-tale princesses
And still other flavors give you the future.

I could say more about futures,
But some people feel it's like telling the ending
To a movie you haven't seen yet,
Or opening your Christmas presents early
And having nothing to do on Christmas morning
But sit around wishing you'd waited,
So I won't.

In some ways Time Gum is very mysterious.
Like, nobody knows when or if
It was, or will be, or would have been invented.
But most futures are full of warehouses full of it
So nobody really worries about it.

Some people wonder if it's safe.
The main danger is cheap imitations
That aren't really Time Gum at all
But just regular gum with drugs in it
To make you think you're on a time trip
When you really aren't.

It seems, however,
That dealers in such bogus wares
Often suddenly find
That their grandparents had no children,
And their parents didn't either,
And neither will they, probably,
So it's never really been a problem.

Still, it's safer to buy from someone you trust.
Just ask your friends to recommend someone.
Chances are they can,
Since Time Gum is not as rare
As you might think.

F'rinstance,
If you've ever endured banquet speeches
That seemed to drone on and on forever,
Or been enjoying a concert
When it ended all too soon,
Chances are that some of the lumps
Stuck to the underside of your seat
Are, or were, or will be, or might have been,
Time Gum.

                                              Thomas G. Digby

                                    written 2340 hr Oct 26 83
                                    entered 0415 hr Nov 22 83



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