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 #95 New Moon of October 6, 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. ********************* When the morning paper arrives, usually between about 3:30 and 4 am, the delivery people pull their car into this building's driveway so they can toss a paper to one of the apartments in an adjacent building without having to get out and walk. Then, since my apartment isn't facing a nearby driveway, they back out into the street before getting out and throwing my paper. Since a couple of downstairs apartments have bedroom windows facing onto the driveway, I'm wondering if this wee-hours traffic disturbs them. Thinking about all this gave the humorist in me mental images of somebody trying to do a paper route on a motorcycle. If this were Cartoonland they wouldn't use just any motorcycle, but whatever kind is loudest. They might not have set out to be loud, but it would have just sort of worked out that way. Maybe the paper was originally delivered by a kid on a bicycle, but something happened to the bicycle so they had to use the motorcycle, which just happened to be handy because it belonged to a friend or relative or something. And maybe it had a sidecar, which can hold more papers than the basket on a bicycle, so even after they got the bicycle back they continued to use the motorcycle. Some people who don't like the noise have tried to get them to stop, but so far all their traps and attempts at sabotage and such have been in vain. So the paper delivery people continue to use the loudest motorcycle in town, blissfully unaware that they're disturbing anyone because it's Cartoonland where making a straightforward complaint about the noise would be cheating. ********************* Thinking about newspaper delivery by motorcycle reminded me of a debate in a traffic column in the local paper about loud motorcycles. Some motorcycle riders claim the noise improves safety by making motorcycles more noticeable to other drivers. But others say the noise is excessive, and that waking up people who happen to live near the road doesn't really improve traffic safety. The thought that occurred to me is to use radio. Put radio transmitters on motorcycles (and also bicycles), to trigger some kind of beeper or something to warn nearby drivers. Then motorcycles won't need to make all that racket. Of course some motorcyclists may have loud mufflers on their machines because they enjoy making noise, with safety being just a convenient cover story. But we can address that issue after we have the radio warning system working. ********************* A local park was having a photo exhibit. The main thing that stuck in my memory was two shots of buildings in slanting sunlight, labeled with titles containing the word "Morning". As I looked at them I felt a certain hard-to-define "morning" kind of feeling. But had they not been so labeled, would I have been able to tell a picture taken in the morning from one taken in the afternoon or evening, assuming I didn't know enough about the site to tell east from west? Were I there in person I might be able to tell the time of day from things like dew (or lack thereof) on the grass, but I suspect that if such subtle signs show in photographs at all I might not know what to look for. Had those same pictures been labeled as "Evening", would my feelings on viewing them have been different? I saw the exhibit in the late morning, around 10:30 or so. Would my mood have been different had I seen the pictures at a different time of day? In real life my mood in the morning is often different from in the evening. Would that carry over to photographs or paintings? That might be an interesting experiment. Paint a picture of a room or landscape or something showing slanting sunlight from a sun near the horizon, then ask people to describe their feelings about it. Tell a third of them it's a morning scene, tell another third it's evening, and don't mention time of day to the remaining third at all. See how their responses differ, if they do. If you have enough subjects to further subdivide the group, try the same experiment at different times of day. Has this experiment been done? ********************* So now what? No hat? That's what happens if somebody tries to ask "Now what?" during a "W" shortage. But that kind of shortage doesn't happen very often, so it's not a major problem. ********************* A friend who's written at least one book doesn't type very well, so he's using a speech recognition program to input stuff he writes. And he was telling me about some of the problems it has. The main problem was that the program seems to be unable to correctly "hear" certain words, such as "enlarger" (he's a photographer). He's tried and tried, but it keeps wanting to substitute phrases such as "and larger". We discussed workarounds such as using a nonsense word instead and then doing a global replace later, but he's not sure he can remember things like lists of nonsense words. That was several weeks ago. More recently it occurred to me that maybe spies are using the word "enlarger" as some kind of secret signal, so the gov't is taking secret countermeasures. If people can't put the word "enlarger" in their correspondence, then spies will be unable to send the secret message that "enlarger" is a code word for. And if that particular secret message is something especially dangerous, such as "Blow up San Francisco as soon as possible," while "and larger" means "Go turn yourself in, the war's over," then inconveniencing legitimate photographers may be a small price to pay for not having San Francisco blown up. So that may be why that speech recognition software won't "hear" the word "enlarger". Of course the Bad Guys might work around this if they have agents who are good enough typists to not need the speech software, but that loophole will be plugged later. If the word "enlarger" really is secret spy code, then sooner or later the President might go on TV to ask all loyal Americans to not use that word any more, and report anybody they find who still does use it. And all photographers are asked to do only contact prints until further notice. It's a small sacrifice to safeguard our freedom. ********************* The election is coming up in a few weeks, and I'm reminded of an idea I've had: Virtual legislative "districts" that voters sign up for by interest. For example, I might run for office for Seat 23 to represent everybody, wherever they may be physically, who registers for Seat 23. So, for example, I might ask gay voters and science fiction fans to register for Seat 23 to vote for me, while other interest groups such as homeowners or unemployed people might sign up for other seats. I previously discussed this idea in Silicon Soapware #22. The friend this came up in conversation with recently thinks it might not work, but isn't sure why yet. But in any event he says it's interesting to think about. ********************* The September 11 anniversary was just a few weeks ago, with the media being full of people talking about memorials to assure that the events of that date will never be forgotten. But why? Why would we want such a thing to be remembered? Yes, there are pragmatic concerns about preventing something similar in the future, but does that require the general public to be constantly reminded of it? Can't the authorities keep it in their lists of things to watch out for while future generations of the public have one less unpleasant event to think about? There seems to be some emotional need to have our major events be remembered by ourselves and our descendants. Is this an innate human thing, or is it cultural? Is there any human culture that would have just cleared the debris, built some kind of ordinary buildings on the site, and gone about business as usual, with the whole affair being forgotten after a couple of generations? Does it have something to do with human mortality? Could it be a form of living on in the monuments one leaves? Would immortal beings put up monuments? And what would a planet full of beings who didn't care about future generations remembering them be like? ********************* There was some kind of Thai street festival a few blocks away, with booths selling stuff and a band playing music. I wandered over for a brief look. One thing I noticed was that the band was using Western rock instruments such as electric guitars and keyboards and a rock-type drum set. They may have had their electronic keyboard set up to imitate some traditional instruments, but I'm not an expert on Thai music so I couldn't really tell. The music did sound vaguely Asian, but not really outside the realm of Western musicians trying to sound Asian. So is Western music taking over the music of other cultures? Or were there more traditional musicians playing at other times when I wasn't around? Or does Thai music just sound that similar to Western music because of parallel evolution or something? ********************* Some telemarketer called, leaving a message about wanting to consolidate my debts. Thing is, I don't really have any debts to consolidate. So why do they keep calling? Is my name on some old list of people who had once been in financial trouble, or are they just calling everybody, or what? Be that as it may, it leads me to wonder: Should I open a debt fragmentation service? Divide and conquer: Split up one big debt that is fearsome to behold into a bunch of little ones so no one item looks too intimidating as you pay them off one at a time while the others politely wait their turn. Would I be able to make a profit doing that? I might make a profit if the debts waiting in the queue continued to accrue interest, but would people buy into that? I suspect a good enough salesperson could get them to. Could I have made a debt-fragmentation thing fly if I had thought of it a couple of years ago during the height of the dot-com boom, and given it some kind of online aspect? Possibly. But whether I could have done it or not, part of me would have serious questions about the ethics of it, especially if the debtors ended up paying higher interest rates than they otherwise would have. So it may be just as well that I didn't get the idea until the boom had busted. ********************* As I was working on the thing about debt fragmentation I was reminded of how the term "phone solicitor" seems to have faded from common use in favor of "telemarketer". Why did this happen? Did the industry push for it, or was it just one of those things that sort of happens that nobody knows the reason for, or what? ********************* Someone I know has a song she often sings at creativity-sharing parties. It's from the viewpoint of some sort of storybook character, perhaps Sleeping Beauty or maybe a vampire or some such, and it starts with the viewpoint character sleeping "for a century or two". After I'd heard it a few times I got to wondering where, in this day and age, one could count of sleeping undisturbed and undiscovered for that long. A cemetery crypt is the obvious possibility, but are there other places? In fairy tales a castle can be enchanted so that brambles and such grow up around it to discourage intruders, and the population of the area is low enough relative to the amount of land that nobody really cares about things like old abandoned castles just sitting there taking up space. So the princess can sleep away the years undisturbed until it's time for the arrival of the prince or knight or whoever is destined to awaken her. But what about modern America? It's hard to think of any place in, say, Los Angeles or the Bay Area, where such a sleeper could rest undisturbed, at least not without protection by the authorities or the property owner. In other parts of the country, such as New England, some colleges and such may have buildings more than a century old, and some of those buildings may have rooms that have been locked up and pretty much forgotten for decades. So sleeping for a couple of hundred years might be plausible there. Likewise, an old house that has been in the same family for many generations could be another possibility. Farther west, there are ghost towns and old abandoned mines, not to mention caves in the mountains. There's always the chance of some random hiker finding you, but if you conceal any obvious entrance to your hiding place you should be fairly safe unless they decide to build a spaceport or an atomic waste repository or something on the site. So if you were a vampire or some such who wanted to sleep away the rest of the 21st Century, where would you go? ********************* Various writers about nanotechnology have mentioned the "gray goo problem", a scenario in which some kind of runaway self-replicating molecule-sized robot destroys the world by turning everything into copies of itself. That got me to thinking that if this does happen but the replication isn't perfect there will be several competing versions of the thing. Then maybe natural selection will apply to evolve more complex forms, leading eventually to some new form of intelligent life. Then that new lifeform may in turn develop its own form of self-replicating technology, which in due time will repeat the cycle of destruction and re-evolution. And so on, over and over forever. ********************* While editing the paragraph about nanotech, I suddenly got to wondering whether vampires and other supernatural beings would be turned into gray goo along with the rest of the world, or whether they would somehow be immune. For example, would nanobots that didn't have silver in their makeup be able to do anything to vampires? This might be worth further thought. ********************* I've been having problems with a tooth lately, and the dentist prescribed an antibiotic. I've noticed that if I let the pill sit on my tongue too long before swallowing it I begin to notice a strange, rather unpleasant taste. At least it doesn't seem to linger once I've swallowed the pill. Part of me wonders if people might learn to like that taste, and if so, use it in foods. Might it appear on some moldy cheeses and such? If one can learn to like it only if exposed to it in childhood, might it become a cultural marker that would keep a tribe from socializing too much with its neighbors, sort of the way the Jewish kosher rules are supposed to have done down through history? Or maybe there's a gene for being able to taste it, like there is for some other things like cilantro, and the tribe doesn't have it while most of their neighbors do. So they put the stuff (which may have health benefits) in their food and either like it or don't notice the difference, while members of other tribes find such food revolting. It also means that if a member of the tribe marries outside, the children may have the gene and thus not like tribal food. So they may say that if there's an intermarriage, the gods will tell them which of the children they do or don't want in the tribe. Children to whom the tribe's food tastes bad have to be sent away, perhaps to live with relatives on the other tribe's side of the family. ********************* Every so often, when I find that some little-used word like "whirligig" is in the spelling dictionary, I continue to marvel at the people who compile dictionaries. Think of all the work that went into compiling lists of words, many of which don't come up all that often. How did they do it? Just sit around thinking of words? That might have served to start a list, but it's not very good in the long run. Maybe they went through books and magazines and newspapers and just listed every word they found? That must have been quite a job in pre-computer days. I think I recall seeing mention in one article of some dictionary publisher having a file of thousands of index cards, one word per card. The hard part must have been after the collection had gotten moderately large, trying to keep track of which words in an article had already been cataloged and which had not. Hopefully they had some program-like procedure for doing it, even if they didn't have computers. Maybe make an alphabetical list of all the words in an article, then check them off against the master files? It could have been something like that. And how do they do it now? Do they have access to machine-readable forms of some newspapers and magazines, and use those? Do they still look through paper versions of some publications, perhaps with the aid of OCR scanners? Do they also scour the Web for samples? And do publications that exist only on paper get under-represented in their sampling because they're harder to deal with? Just another of life's little questions that most of us don't think about all that often. ********************* The Wind Calling It's Phone Book Delivery Day: Yellow Pages wait outside my door. The wind riffles through them As if trying to look up numbers for The sun and the rain. -- Tom Digby Written 18:27 06/14/2002 ********************* Summer Leaves September, 2002 The restless air of dying summer Kicks up piles of long-lost memories Drifted into forgotten corners of my mind Like the leaves that will soon be falling from the trees. Those trees whisper to me of things long forgotten, Ghosts of memories of memories of memories. But I cannot decipher their language As the ghosts play hide-and-seek. -- Tom Digby Written 15:45 09/06/2002 Edited 20:18 09/16/2002 ********************* 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. If there's no mention of "bubbles.best.vwh.net" in the headers, you're getting the BCC version. That's the one for those who want just Silicon Soapware with no banter. The zine content is the same for both. To get on the conversation-list version point your browser to http://bubbles.best.vwh.net/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi and select the ss_talk list. Enter your email address in the space provided and hit Signup. 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