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 #88 New Moon of March 13, 2002 Contents copyright 2002 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. ********************* Excerpts from the Cartoonland Metro Police log: 7:47 pm: A telemarketer called. The dispatcher hung up on him. 7:53 pm: A telemarketer called. The dispatcher hung up on him. 8:02 pm: A telemarketer called. The dispatcher hung up on him. 8:19 pm: A caller at the phone booth in front of MegaCorp Consolidated Telemarketing reported that one of the telemarketers had been shot inside the building. An officer was sent to investigate. 8:38 pm: Officer Joe Thursday arrived at MegaCorp Consolidated Telemarketing and found one of the telemarketers wandering around in a dazed condition, with his head wrapped in bandages from an apparent gunshot wound. Other telemarketers say they heard what sounded like a shot at about 7:45 pm. Attempts to call the police from the telemarketers' work phones were unsuccessful, hence the delay in reporting the incident. Eventually someone called from the phone booth out front and managed to get through. Detectives and an ambulance were sent. 9:43 pm: Doctors determined that the telemarketer [name withheld pending notification of kin] had indeed been shot, at point-blank range. The bullet entered the left ear and exited from the right ear. With this information as a clue, Detective Watson Holmes found the bullet lodged in the cubicle wall. The bullet was sent to Ballistics for analysis. Detective Holmes noted that the position of the bullet was consistent with the telemarketer being shot while talking on the phone. But there would not have been room in the narrow cubicle for the assailant to stand at the telemarketer's left and put a gun to the telemarketer's ear. Also, the telemarketer normally held the phone to his left ear, so it would have been in the way. In addition, other telemarketers reported seeing no suspicious persons in the vicinity. 10:18 am (next day): The Ballistics people reported that the bullet has telephone wire marks on it, consistent with it having been fired through the Cartoonland phone system. Detective Holmes theorized that a customer, enraged by the telemarketer call, put a gun to the telephone mouthpiece and fired. The bullet would have gone through the phone system and emerged from the telemarketer's telephone earpiece. He advised MegaCorp Consolidated Telemarketing to check their logs from around the time of the shooting. 11:43 am: A telemarketer called. The dispatcher hung up on him. 11:45 am: A caller at the phone booth in front of MegaCorp Consolidated Telemarketing reports that a technician suffered minor injuries when a bullet emerged from the recorder speaker while the technician was listening to a recording. This turned out to be a recording of the phone call that was in progress when the telemarketer was shot yesterday evening. Since the injuries rated only a band-aid or two, no ambulance was sent. The caller also gave police the number that had been called. 1:13 pm: Detectives contacted the phone company and got the name and address of the person the phone number belongs to. They expect to make an arrest this evening when the suspect gets home from work. ********************* An unused packet of honey on the table at a restaurant during a recent dinner get-together got me to wondering how many bee-days of work it represented. Does anybody have figures? ********************* As I was brushing my hair I recalled a conversation in which someone said that people shouldn't leave hair from combs, etc., out for birds to build nest with because it was bad for them. Supposedly they swallow bits of it and it clogs up their systems. Or something like that. But there's animal hair being shed all over the place, maybe not constantly, but fairly often. So why should human hair be any worse than squirrel hair or mouse hair or whatever? The first reason that comes to mind is length. If you exclude humans, small mammals are more numerous than large ones, and their fur is seldom more than half an inch or so thick. Squirrel tails may have longer hair on them, but it's still only a couple of inches at most. Animal hair more than a few inches long is rare. You have things like horse tails and manes, and lion manes, but those are probably a very small portion of the animal hair in the environment in most places. So maybe birds and such just haven't evolved to cope with individual hairs longer than a couple of inches. Maybe the solution is that if you have long hair and you want to put it out for birds to build nests with, you should cut it up into short pieces, at most an inch or two long. That would make it more similar to hair they might get from other species of animals. But there could be another problem: Chemicals. Many humans douse their hair with hair tonic or styling gels or dyes or any of a long list of other chemicals that other animals don't put on their fur. So perhaps the chemicals in human hair might be toxic to birds who build it into their nests. If that's the case your hair might be OK for bird nests if you go the "natural" route, but not if you dye it or condition it or whatever. Does anybody really have authoritative scientific word on this? ********************* Astronomers have found a number of Jupiter-sized planets orbiting other stars at distances much closer than from our sun to Jupiter. That leads to thoughts that some of them could be in orbits such that they could have Earth-like satellites, perhaps like the rebel world in the original Star Wars movie. And if they have Earth-like satellites, some of those satellites might have intelligent life. Now imagine intelligent life on such a world getting to the point where they start figuring out orbits and such, roughly equivalent to Europeans around Galileo's time. How will they react when they start deducing their world's place in the grand scheme of things? Will the fact that they are two levels below their sun in the hierarchy rather than one level down like Earth make a difference? ********************* During a discussion of the homeless problem somebody mentioned that quote about the law forbidding the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges. That reminded me of other times when various communities tried to exclude those less financially well off by outlawing the least expensive ways to live there. Examples of this include things like zoning laws specifying minimum sizes for residential lots and limiting the number of people who can share a dwelling. That reminded me of that I'd once thought of what may be the ultimate in such schemes: Building a big dome over the city and pumping out the air. Then only those who could afford spacesuits could live there. That would solve the homeless problem once and for all. It would also eliminate stray dogs, along with rats and other vermin. Keep Our City Clean. Dwelling units would presumably be pressurized, so people could take their spacesuits off at home. You might also do the same for the workplace, although making people keep their spacesuits on at work would, if the faceplates were silvered so you couldn't see in, end racial discrimination. If you put the right voice-disguising electronics in the suit's audio communication equipment you might end gender discrimination as well. And it's harder to sexually harass somebody through a spacesuit. There would of course be engineering problems. A hemispherical dome over a city like SF would be maybe three or four miles in radius, a challenge to build even before you add the stress of pumping a vacuum inside. I suppose you could fill it with inert gas, but that's kind of cheating. Also, you might have to reroute some of the flight paths from nearby airports. There's also the potential for traffic delays from having airlocks on the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges, as well as the 101 and 280 freeways. Maybe those could be combined with toll collection, except that some of the freeways aren't toll roads at present. But if you collect tolls there anyway, money from airlock tolls could help pay for the dome. There would be other advantages as well. You wouldn't be getting bird poop on parked cars, and the cars would have to be electric or some other technology that didn't need air, so that would eliminate the smog problem. And conflicts between smokers and non-smokers would vanish. Smoke all you want anywhere you want, as long as the smoke stays inside your spacesuit. And if a building caught on fire you'd just let the air out, whereupon combustion would cease forthwith. That means the Fire Department wouldn't have to be in as much of a hurry, which would make up for people not being able to hear the sirens on fire trucks because of no air to carry the sound. You'd need some kind of emergency space helmets or something for building evacuations in case of fire or earthquake, but that's just another little engineering problem. On second thought, maybe people should just keep their spacesuits on all the time. The underarm deodorant industry might suffer because people couldn't smell each other, but that's part of the price of Progress. The November elections will be coming up in a few months. Does anybody want to make this scheme part of their platform? ********************* Someone I know claims that secret agents (CIA, NSA, etc.) have a "Get Out of Jail Free" card they can show local cops so they won't be arrested if they're caught with a carload of illegal drugs or weapons or some such. I'm wondering how much, if any, truth there is to this. And I'm also wondering what happens if the agent is caught by a rival agency (Al Queda, Mossad, whatever) and they find this card on him. Even if the card is disguised as something else (business card, club membership, etc.), once enough local cops know about it somebody is almost sure to spill the beans. And local cops everywhere would have to know about it or it wouldn't work. Even if you have several different types of card at any one time so no one person has to know about them all, there's still a fair amount of risk. It just doesn't seem practical unless it's changed quite often, and even then it's not foolproof. ********************* Some people want a future where there are no big corporate media companies, who many view as evil. In such a world, to take music as an example, a million musicians might have a few hundred fans each, along with a fringe of a few thousand more people who know a little about them, but there would be no national or international superstars. This might work by means of something like the Web, with the help of advanced search technology and networks of individuals telling each other, "If you liked X you might also like Y." But would such a world be good for us as a global society? You would no longer be able to make small talk about movies or music or books or the like with people you've just met at parties, or with sales prospects at business lunches, or in similar situations. What effects would this have on our culture? Do we as a society need a common canon of songs and catch phrases and movies and such that "everybody" knows? If so, do we need something like the giant media conglomerates (or, in other countries, some kind of government Ministry of Culture) to manage it and act as gatekeepers to control which ideas get added to the canon and which do not? People's ability to absorb information is limited, so such a canon would need some kind of gatekeeper to control the addition of new material. Of course even if society does need a common canon, it may not need to be as all-encompassing as ours is now. There might be room for more obscure things with smaller audiences, as long as we all share some minimum amount of common material. So maybe the big media corporations do need to be there, but they don't need to be as big as they currently are. ********************* This probably wants a tune, but I don't have one yet. Maybe later. Will Others Sing Our Songs? The museum is dark and empty, I'm working late tonight, Cataloging relics of A world that died when Man was not yet Man. There's writing on this tablet. What meaning did it have? I doubt we'll ever know although We'll try to piece together what we can. CHORUS: Will others sing our songs when our world is in its grave, Even when our voices do not fit their ears? And what of their tomorrows, when time itself grows cold? Will there be something better than oblivion? They say they found the tablet Lying with the ruins Of instruments of music that were Never made for human hands or breath. And as I touch the carvings I somehow think I know The song that they were singing as they Realized their world was facing death. CHORUS Museums are always haunted, I sort of half believe, By those who lived with all the things We keep as a reminder of the past. And something Unseen tells me They'll never truly die. Across the gulfs of space and time Their songs are being sung again at last. CHORUS -- Tom Digby 18:31 02/23/2002 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU If you're getting it via email and the Reply-to in the headers is ss_talk@bubbles.best.vwh.net you're getting the list version, and anything you send to that address will be posted. That's the one you want if you like conversation. There's usually a burst of activity after each issue, often dying down to almost nothing in between. Any post can spark a new flurry at any time. 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