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 #78 New Moon of May 22,2001 Contents copyright 2001 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. ********************* 7 8 5 5 3 4 4 6 9 7 8 8 What's the logic of those numbers? They're the number of letters in the names of the months in English. For some reason month names are shortest in spring and summer and longer in fall and winter. Coincidence? Also, notice that only one month has the same number of letters in its name as its position in the year. That's probably another coincidence, especially since the name actually means "seventh month" while that month is currently ninth and its name has nine letters. ********************* There was discussion on an email list (not mine) about some science- fictional creature that fed on negative emotions. It was always stirring up conflict among humans and others in order to gain sustenance. That led me to thoughts I'd had earlier, of some similar species of creature where most individuals fed on negative energy but a few fed on positive energy and therefore tried to keep people around them happy. In that case would the tribe try to keep the positive ones around instead of driving them away or killing them like they did with the negative ones? There might be story possibilities here, especially if whatever means people had for detecting these creatures did not immediately indicate which ones were good and which were bad with any degree of certainty. ********************* A while back I got to musing on one of those questions that has an answer only if you don't think too much: How much is the iron in the Earth's core worth? The unthinking way to answer would be to look up the latest scientific estimates of how much iron is in the Earth's core, multiply that by the current price of iron on the commodities market (converting measurement units as required), and announce that the Earth's core is worth umpty-ump zillion dollars, whatever number you get. But then when you think on it some more, you realize that that's not really a good answer. For one thing, the amount of iron in the Earths' core is large compared to the amount currently on the market. If you were to suddenly try to sell that much iron the price would probably plummet. You might try to get around that by postulating an essentially infinite market, perhaps intergalactic in scope, but you would have no real way of knowing what prices on such a market might be. You could try to claim that intergalactic iron prices would be the same as prices on current Earth- based markets, but you'd have nothing to back that up. And if there are things like iron asteroids just floating around for the taking, or maybe uninhabited planets where nobody cares about strip mining, there is good reason to believe the price would be different. And there's another problem: If you took all the iron out of the Earth's core, the rest of the Earth would collapse. Not good at all. You might talk about shoring the now-hollow Earth up with force fields and using tractor beams to counteract the reduction in gravity from all that missing mass, but we don't currently have that technology and we have no idea how much it would cost if we were to develop it, assuming it's even possible. Since those unknown costs would have to be charged against the gross revenue from selling the iron, we have no assurance the deal would be profitable at all. While a hollow Earth might have other economic advantages, such as being able to sell real estate inside, we are again in the realm of pure speculation. So we can't claim we could pay for the tractor beams and force fields that way. Likewise, getting the iron out of the Earth's core would take technology we don't currently have and which may or may not be possible to develop. More pure speculation. And finally, the scheme may not be legal. According to some authorities, land ownership on Earth extends down to the center in a sort of inverted pyramid. If you were to want to mine the core you'd need to get permission from whoever holds mineral rights to all the land on Earth. If you got some permissions but not all, you still might be able to do it by working around the areas you couldn't get permission for, but that would have its own set of problems. So all in all, the question "How much is the iron in the Earth's core worth?" is rather meaningless unless you don't think about it. ********************* Suppose some genie or something came up with a sort of magical super- microfiche containing copies of all books ever published, with all copyright issues magically cleared. Suppose the whole thing could fit into the space taken by a desk and cost little or nothing to maintain once you had it. And suppose they offered this to public libraries free or at a very low cost. Should the library take it? What triggered this is that there's apparently some new law about libraries having to block "adult" Web sites from their public-access computers, on pain of losing some kind of Federal funding. The usual implementation of such blocking is via some kind of software on publicly accessible computers. One of the arguments I've heard against such software is that the technology is imperfect. It sometimes blocks things like legitimate medical sites or restaurant menus that feature chicken breast, while letting some pornography through. I suspect this argument will gradually vanish over the long run as the technology gets better, so let's not consider it here. Another argument against blocking might make analogies with the generally open access to physical books. But there's one big difference. The library staff is actively involved in acquiring physical books, which means they've been sort of screened. Pornography, crackpottery, and the like are generally under-represented while books the community considers "good" are over-represented. There's no such screening with Web sites. Web sites are more like the magical "every book ever published" package I mentioned earlier. Following this analogy could lead to a rule that library Internet computers start out with access to no sites, with the staff approving sites for access one by one as people nominated them. The staff would keep a list of approved sites, analogous to the present card catalogs for books, and users would be able to access only those. That would be analogous to the library staff buying books and magazines (or accepting donated ones) one by one and physically putting them on their shelves. I think the main problem with this approach is the sheer volume of Web sites. There are millions of them out there, maybe hundreds of millions. There are also millions of book titles, but those took decades or centuries to accumulate and the typical library is limited in how many its shelves can hold. The number of Web sites is (or soon will be) orders of magnitude greater than the number of book or zine titles. And they all appeared relatively quickly, the majority within the last five years or so. No library staff would be able to keep up with it all. So we're back to the magical "every book" package. If your local public library were offered a package of Every Book Ever Published, including all the classics, school textbooks, pornography, vanity presses, crackpottery, sacred writings of religions you do or don't agree with, and whatever else exists that I haven't thought of, in a form that would fit easily into even a small building, should they take it? ********************* I just saw that "Mummy" sequel. The plot is kind of tangled, but part of it involves a "Scorpion King" who ravaged much of ancient Egypt before being banished into suspended animation or something. He awakens in the 1930's whereupon many special effects ensue before he is defeated again, presumably for good (unless, perhaps, they decide on another sequel). This person supposedly was given his powers by one of the ancient Egyptian gods. And it supposedly was in the agreement that if certain events (many rather symbolic, such as someone being at a certain place at the right time with a certain artifact) took place his army of sand- demons or whatever would become invincible. That left me with questions. First, would the army have been truly invincible, especially if the timing had been different? Would it, for example, have been able to stand up to the combined Egyptian, Israeli, and US military forces of the year 2002 or thereabouts? If that didn't stop it, how good a job might it do of conquering China? Would it be able to withstand nukes, assuming the various nuclear powers decided to take that step? And even if whatever Egyptian god was backing this enterprise was strong enough to deal with the rest of Earth's physical armies, what of other gods? If your movie universe gives power to some gods, why not all gods? So how, for example, would the Scorpion King fare against the combined might of the Norse, Greek, and Roman pantheons, not to mention whatever others might join the fray? Would it be a matter of home turf? Might this demon army be invincible as long as it stayed in Egypt, but end up getting soundly trounced by various other gods once it crossed the Mediterranean into Europe? And if the Egyptian demon army decided to use Palestine as an invasion route to the rest of the world, it could arouse the wrath of a certain really major god known by various names by people in the vicinity of Jerusalem and elsewhere. That would very likely bring a quick end to the Scorpion King's military career. Thing is, that god isn't much into special effects nowadays. He would probably just work things out with the script writers to make sure the Scorpion King never really got that far. ********************* Once, several years ago, I was walking down a street when I passed a telephone pole and the thought of undead dryads popped into my head. I didn't flesh out the idea then, but I've mentioned it a couple of times, generally as an example of the kind of thing I tend to come up with that seems to freak out "ordinary" people when I mention having thought of it. It came up again at Baycon, again in the context of things that many of those people who do not enjoy playing with ideas seem to consider too strange to think about. But this time I fleshed it out a little. The dryad would probably be the one that was originally in the tree the telephone pole was made from. Since many telephone poles also carry power lines, perhaps she would live by draining a little of that electric power, not enough for the power company to notice. If the pole also carried TV cable the dryad might somehow be able to watch. And she would listen in on conversations on the phone lines, and perhaps even say something now and then. What would an undead dryad in a telephone pole say on the phone? At first she might just make mischief by impersonating one of the parties and putting different words in their mouth. She might also take perverse pleasure in causing modems to disconnect. But once in a great while she would find someone who was more in tune with the spirit world than most, and she could, after some initial awkwardness, talk with them openly. Some might even become friends and converse regularly. Would a phone-pole dryad ever become visible to the eye? Possibly. If you're out on a moonlit summer night and you see a woman you don't know just sort of standing around by a telephone pole, she might be such a dryad. ********************* 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 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). 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