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/~bubbles/ Issue #71 New Moon of October 27, 2000 Contents copyright 2000 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. ********************* ADMINISTRATIVE NOTE: The ISP I use for the Silicon Soapware discussion email list had a disk crash in late September. Since they had no backups they had no way of knowing what lists had been there or who had been running them, and thus couldn't send out any sort of notice about it. I didn't find out about the problem until after I'd tried to post SS #70 and it bounced, and other people started asking me why their emails to the list weren't getting posted. After a couple of false starts and some tech problems, the list seems to be up again. I happened to have a list of subscribers as of last February, and used that to repopulate the list. So if you're changed addresses or unsubscribed since then, you'll need to do it again. I think the info at the end of this zine is still good. By the way, you can't unsubscribe an address you can't send email from. If it's been disconnected, it will be unsubbed automatically after a certain number of bounces, so don't worry about it. If it's being forwarded and you want it stopped, let me know so I can shut it off. Also, if you know anybody who first subscribed between February and October, it's likely that no record exists for them. So you might want to tell them about the problem. ********************* A few weeks ago I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in years, and gave him my email address. Later, when I replied to his test message, I said "It's me, I think." He replied about how disturbing it would be if I was wrong. But would it be disturbing at all? If I were someone else tomorrow, with all that other person's memories, I probably wouldn't be wondering about who else I'd been. I would just sort of accept being that other person. It's possible, of course, that I might then happen to be the sort of person who wonders about having been other people, but I think the odds are against that. Most people just sort of seem to be who they are without thinking about it much. For all I know we're constantly switching around being other people, but since we don't carry those memories with us we never notice it. We just think we're always us. Didn't the movie "Dark City" get into a little of this? That was the one where some city was being secretly run by aliens or something as a research project. They didn't seem to swap people around so that Person A became Person B while the previous Person B became Person C and Person D might become Person A, but they did change people's lives overnight, including changing their memories accordingly. I think it started to break down when one person's memories didn't get erased properly and he started making waves. By the way, that is one of at least three unrelated films titled "Dark City". The other two are about gangsters and murder and such. You should be able to tell when a movie you're watching titled "Dark City" isn't the one I've been talking about. ********************* Thoughts about some other people's attitudes toward computers led me to the idea of a car that runs on magic, but only if you don't know and don't care how it works. If you get too curious about what's under the hood it stops. And of course it doesn't work for the person who made it, because that person knows too much about the details. If such a thing existed and became common enough, what would it do to culture and education? Would we see more sayings along the lines of "Curiosity killed the cat," "Ignorance is bliss," and the like? Would there be more "Pandora's Box" and "Bluebeard" stories about what happens when you delve into things you've been warned to stay out of? Would this lead to a general attitude of "Don't question authority," which would tend to favor dictatorships over democracies? And what of the people who make those magical things and therefore can't use them because they know too much? Would they be looked up to as some kind of geniuses, or looked down on as unfortunates doomed to an inferior level of existence because they can't use the luxuries they provide the rest of us? Questions abound. As usual, answers do not. ********************* If an email starts out "THIS IS NOT SPAM" it's almost certainly baloney. ********************* Many people are leery of using email for business matters because in theory it can be intercepted at any of the machines it passes through on its journey. People also seem to think of voice phone as more secure in that regard. But is it? Voice phone used to be relatively secure in that an eavesdropper had to climb a pole (rather conspicuous unless you had a phone company truck and the right clothes and such), or prowl around your home to hook into the wires there, or else have access to phone company facilities. That pretty much limited wiretapping to law enforcement, spies, and other major players. Email, on the other hand, is said to be vulnerable to anyone at any of the Internet sites it passes through. But with the proliferation of phone service providers now, there may no longer be a monolithic The Phone Company that people can trust to keep their secrets secret. Are these small phone companies any more trustworthy than the many small Internet companies people use for email nowadays? It may well be easier to forge email than to imitate someone else's voice on the phone, especially if the recipient doesn't look at all the header info on the email (including the parts many email programs hide). But I'm not sure there's all that much difference one way or the other in the ease of eavesdropping. ********************* Here's a question I've wondered about and haven't seen the answer to. I don't know if it's been researched or not: In terms of the electromagnetic and other forces within and between atoms, why does a lever produce leverage? Why is it able to trade force for distance the way it does? You might be tempted to say that for a lever to do otherwise would violate Conservation of Energy. But that doesn't seem to me to be a real answer. It doesn't explain how atoms near the fulcrum "know" that they can apply a stronger force against whatever they're pushing against than atoms farther away. ********************* Something in a comic strip caught my eye: A kid was demanding that his parents buy him a particular toy that the kid described as, "You blow it up and throw it out the window." Didn't say what happens after that. Do you retrieve it and repeat the cycle? Is it just Gone? Didn't say. Maybe they didn't need to say. It was probably just a minor comment on heavily hyped toys that have only limited play value and only for a limited time until the kid gets tired of it. "You play with it for a few hours and then get tired of it and eventually Mom and Dad put it in the attic and forget about it" isn't all that far from "You blow it up and throw it out the window." ********************* Some gun-control rhetoric uses the line that the only use of certain types of handguns is to kill people. If someone has a gun whose only use is to kill people but instead uses it as a paperweight, is he committing a logical absurdity? Does the contradiction vanish if he's a prison warden or maybe an evil dictator or something and the papers he's weighing down are death warrants? ********************* I recently noticed that I frequently add "or what?" to the list of possibilities in things I write about wondering about. Why do I do that? I think my feeling is that a question of the form "Is it A, B, or C?" implies strict multiple choice, while "It is A, B, C, or what?" allows for other possibilities that aren't listed. In other words, "or what" is another way of saying "Other ______________". Since there's almost always at least a slight chance of some other possibility popping up even if I think I have a complete list, I tend to put "or what" on such questions on general principles. ********************* I somehow got to thinking about migratory birds, and how some go all the way from one temperate region to the other while others spend their off- season in the tropics. That would mean the tropics could get two alternating crops of migratory birds, one from each hemisphere during that hemisphere's winter, not to mention transients passing through each spring and fall. Are there places that have essentially no seasons weather-wise but can still mark the passage of time by what birds are and are not around? When I saved my thoughts to a file I just happened to name that file "timebird". But that brought forth other images, like some kind of magical bird that can fly back and forth through time. Perhaps if you capture one and hold onto it, when you eventually let it go it'll fly back to where and when you caught it, like a homing pigeon in four dimensions. So what you do is find a timebird nest, and capture the mother as she's sitting on the eggs or feeding the babies. Then no matter how many years you keep her, she'll eventually come back to just after you took her away, and take up motherly duties right where she left off. When you go to catch a timebird you take an assistant with you, with instructions to stay behind to catch the bird again, and retrieve whatever message she's brought back. You don't keep the bird the second time you catch her. You could in theory, but there's a sort of etiquette against it. You don't want to take the chance of endangering the species, or giving timebirds an incentive to go to sometime when there were or will be no people around. In theory timebirds can also fly into the future, but most people who aren't time travelers have no way of getting hold of one whose home is in the future, so that's a moot point. Maybe one could be visiting its past for some reason when you catch it, but there's no real way of knowing so it would be pure luck. Besides, there are other ways of sending messages into the future, so you don't need timebirds for that. ********************* There's a radio commercial about a father telling his son a fairy tale about a talking snake who wants to buy a car. The father is trying to make the point that you should log into the Internet search site being advertised, while the son keeps getting hung up on "How can a snake drive a car?" The inner story seems to take place in a fairy-tale world of talking animals, so getting at least a learner's permit should be no problem, even for a snake (unless we want to get into the topic of anti- discrimination laws). But how would the snake physically work the steering wheel and pedals and such? I'm guessing he'd need custom controls, like for people with certain handicaps. But what? How would you design a set of controls for a snake to drive a car? If the species of snake makes a difference, it's a king cobra. He may have been threatening to bite people who don't help him get the car he wants, in which case he may be going to prison for extortion, which would make the whole thing moot, at least for now. But if he still wants a car when he gets out of prison, how will he drive it? ********************* Something got me wondering about early humans and fire. Which came first: Storytelling or the campfire? ********************* Yesterday while lying in bed I got to thinking of the Sargasso Sea, and how one would explain the concept to space aliens. Would they have similar legends? Even if they did have such legends about the seas of their home world before they went into space, would space-based versions of the legends develop? Perhaps there are regions of space where magnetic fields or whatever would cause derelict craft to accumulate? I don't think that's likely in our space, but perhaps they have some kind of FTL that uses a hyperspace that not even they know all about yet. That's long been a theme in science fiction: A hyperspace where the normal rules don't apply, and ghostly dreamlike things happen. If such a hyperspace existed, humans would sooner or later start telling ghost stories about it. Would beings from other worlds do likewise? Even if their scientists were to scoff at such tales, the technology may be such that not all crew members on their craft would need to be educated in matters of science. If their sailors (sea or space) are superstitious like ours traditionally are, there would be Tales. And maybe there are also superstitions around black holes. Maybe they're portals to something like our classical Hades. No physical tests will ever prove that, but spirits, being non-material, are not bound by gravity and relativity, so if you get too close to a black hole without the proper protective spells (which their scientists are supposed to scoff at even if not all do) Weird Things may happen. We tend to think of space aliens from UFO's and such as one monolithic culture, free of human foibles. But that may well not be the case. They could be as diverse as Earth people, perhaps more so. You could argue from Occam's Razor that any other culture out there would be monolithic, but you would be likely to be wrong. ********************* Incident Along Fantasy Way 1840 hr 7/28/74 The Derelicts Daytime-- The street is subdued, quiet, drowsing in the sun. Most of the strangeness has faded. Day is less a time for dreaming. I come upon a sign: "TO THE SARGASSO SEA" it says, Pointing to a faint little-used path leading off over a hill. Some sea air would be nice on such a warm day But it is not to be. For being, as all are here, in many places at once, I am also in the supermarket So my Sargasso Sea is instead The Valley of Lost Shopping Carts. From all of space and time come the carts that thoughtless shoppers "Borrow" and neglect to return, Piled in heaps of rusting confusion, the familiar shapes with familiar store names Mixed with antigravity platforms from the far future And with contrivances totally unrecognizable Save that there function has somehow made them eligible To be tossed here. Thomas G. Digby written 1840 hr 7/28/74 entered 2210 hr 2/08/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the headers show the originating site as "lists.best.com" you're getting the list version, and anything you send to DigbyZine@lists.best.com will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, dying down to almost nothing in between. But any post can spark a new flurry. If there's no mention of "lists.best.com" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The content is the same for both. To get on or off the conversation-list version send email to DigbyZine-request@lists.best.com with the word "subscribe" (to get on the list) or "unsubscribe" (to get off) in the body, but nothing else (except maybe your signature if that's automatic). Then when you get a confirmation message edit the REJECT in the subject line to ACCEPT and send it back. To get on or off the BCC list email me (bubbles@well.sf.ca.us or bubbles@well.com). I do that one manually. -- END --