SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #82 New Moon of September 17, 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. ********************* The year 2001 has been tarnished. Up to now it had been a symbol of some vague but glorious future. Now it's on the list of Days of Infamy, along with Pearl Harbor and the JFK shooting. The year still has about three months left. Is that enough time for any of the old optimism to be fulfilled, or is there only time for more infamy? ********************* In the aftermath of the events of the past week, someone on another forum remarked that it was IMPOSSIBLE (their emphasis) to hijack a train and use it as a major weapon of terror. Since I tend to take the word "impossible" as a challenge, I got to thinking. While it probably isn't practical in our world to do much with a hijacked train that you couldn't do just as well with some rented trucks, Cartoonland might offer more possibilities. Say you wanted to take out Cartoonland's equivalent of the White House. What you might do is get a bunch of railroad track, paint it green to match the lawn so it would be less likely to be noticed, and then have a crew sneak in and lay it while another member of the group (possibly female, with exaggerated breasts and such) distracts the guards. You run one end of it right up to the side of the targeted building while the other end connects with an existing main line somewhere. Then as some big freight is approaching you throw the switch so it goes onto your track rather than the normal route. Notice that you don't really need to threaten the train crew. Just set the switch and the train goes wherever your tracks take it. You might want to also put up a bunch of green-light signals plus a painting of a fake tunnel entrance at the target building so the engineer doesn't see any reason to stop. Just be sure that if you do use a fake tunnel entrance you paint it on canvas or something and yank it away at the last moment so the train doesn't escape into the tunnel instead of crashing into the building. Of course things can go wrong. Some gardener or somebody might trip over the green-painted rails and report the track as being suspicious. Then the authorities could quickly add track of their own to detour the train safely around the building and back onto its normal route. But even so, there's a chance it may not be noticed in time so your plot just might succeed. ********************* The World Trade Center attack reminds me of something I've wondered about off and on for years: Are we getting to a point technologically where the average citizen will have access to so much destructive power that freedom will no longer be feasible? For example, in a few years any biochem grad student will be able to make deadly viruses (or other kinds of germs) in any well-equipped college- level laboratory, perhaps disguised as some kind of Silicon Valley biochem startup. At that time will we dare allow scientists working in those areas to openly publish their results? Will we dare allow high- tech startups to keep trade secrets? Will we dare allow people to drive from one city to another without the equivalent of Customs inspection or airport security every few miles? Also, there's a song from some years back about hijacking a starship. If we had starships, what kind of damage could you do to a planet by crashing one at a significant fraction of lightspeed? Even if the authorities saw it coming and managed to shoot it down (to the extent that the concept of shooting a spaceship "down" exists), the debris would continue on more or less the original trajectory and could still do significant damage. Will the security we'll need for such things make any meaningful freedom impractical? ********************* The mayor of New York City was quoted as saying they would rebuild. But I wonder if a rebuilt World Trade Center might turn out to be something of an economic dinosaur. What with the Internet and all, do we still need such concentrations of physical offices? Will we see more decentralization, more telecommuting, and fewer physical business centers like the World Trade Center and the NYSE? ********************* In unrelated news, during a concert a couple of weeks ago I got to wondering about musical instruments on other planets. Even assuming they have hearing about the same as ours, their musical instruments would probably be different. For example, if they don't have lips then Earth-type brass instruments won't work for them. In addition, our woodwinds have complicated arrangements of keys and levers and such set up for human-type fingers. Alien hands may not be able to work them. And our mouthpieces may not fit with alien oral anatomy, assuming they can even blow through their mouth at all. Strings? Most strings require fingers, but may not be quite as human- specific as woodwinds. Some kinds of alien fingers would work on some Earth-type stringed instruments while others wouldn't. Percussion? That's probably the easiest. Most of it ought to be compatible with anything that can handle tools about the size of drumsticks. Keyboards would also be easy, if they have anything like fingers. Likewise, what of alien instruments? There would be some that Earth humans could play and others that we couldn't play. There's also the issue of scales and tuning. There may be considerable parallel evolution here. For example, if they tend to favor tones whose frequencies differ by ratios of small integers they're likely to have invented our major chords, which have frequency ratios such as 3:4:5 or 4:5:6 (before getting into complications such as equal temper). This, however, may be largely accidents of culture, since some human societies use musical scales that sound alien to Western ears. Would they perceive notes an octave apart (1:2 ratio) as being similar, as we do? They might, because of the way most sources produce harmonics. But you never know. ********************* One singer in a coffee house had trouble remembering the words. That led me to thoughts of a singing St. Bernard dog going to the rescue. He might have a mike and amplifier and such built into that little keg thingie that St. Bernards are supposed to wear around their necks. So the dog would go up onto the stage and sing along with the singer until things were OK again. Unfortunately, no such rescue dogs were in evidence that night. ********************* During the last few weeks, as the dry season wears on, ants have been crawling into my refrigerator and freezer. They get anywhere from a half-inch to several inches in (perhaps farthest during the automatic defrost cycle) and die there. I've collected at least a tablespoon of them so far. I suspect part of the reason for this behavior is that some species of ants never evolved temperature sensors. If they normally don't have occasion to walk from their normal environment into some place that's too hot or too cold, they would have no reason to know the temperature. Even if they did sometimes get into places that were too hot (stones in sunlight, for example) they might never get into situations of being too cold. So they never evolved sensory equipment that would warn them about refrigerators. ********************* Some bank robber or something goes to prison, is put to breaking rocks on the rock pile. Turns out he's good at it, and his rock pieces are in demand for everything from rock gardens to aquarium gravel. Maybe it starts with the warden's rock garden and word spreads from there. Anyway, when he gets out he goes straight, selling broken-up rocks. He's successful, and by the time he starts getting too old to smash the rocks himself he's in a position to hire apprentices to do the hard parts for him. So there's a happy ending. I don't think real prisons have that kind of rock pile nowadays, and people in real life don't care that much about rocks, but in Cartoonland it might happen. ********************* A few nights back I dreamed I was making eggs magically appear and disappear. Then as I was waking up I got to thinking about things like the amount of E=MC^2 in the mass of an egg and what might happen if something went wrong with the spell. Ten or twenty grams of random photons could make the whole vicinity rather unpleasant. Are there safe ways of doing it, and do they teach about that in Magic School? ********************* At the building-supply store: Customer: "What's with these so-called "double pane" windows? I only see one layer of glass. And by the way, you misspelled "pane" on the sign." Clerk: "No, the sign is right. The glass is impregnated with a chemical that blocks endorphins, so if a burglar or somebody breaks one and cuts himself it'll hurt twice as much as usual. Like the sign says, they're double-pain windows." ********************* The Other Half of the Dream As he glides through Silicon Valley in his fancy car with the dollar-sign hood ornament He begins to feel uneasy. Seeking reassurance, he pats the bags of coins on the seat beside him. The cold hard cash offers little comfort. Suddenly he realizes the problem: Half of him is missing. The poet, dreamer, artist, He Who Cannot Be Named, is no longer there. How long he has been gone is unclear. He was last aware of him on one rough stretch of road when the car was not fancy at all And could barely carry them through the stormy night. There were no bags of coins then. His other half would keep pestering him: "I have this idea ..." "Not now! Can't you wait until the road gets smoother?" The cries for attention gradually ceased. When the road did smooth out in sunshine and the bags of coins started piling up He no longer noticed the silence. Where had his other half gone? Hiding under the seat? Jumped out at a traffic light? Dried up and blown out the window? There's no way of knowing. He thinks of going back to search, But this is a one-way road. There is, however a chance That his missing half had hitched a ride or found a short cut And is waiting up ahead. He needs to make room for him. With half a hope he pulls over And begins shifting the bags of coins to the back seat. The cold hard cash offers little comfort. -- Thomas G. Digby First draft 20:46 08/30/2001 Edited 22:17 08/30/2001 ********************* 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 --