SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #140 New Moon of May 26, 2006 Contents copyright 2006 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. ********************* As this issue goes to press (or the electronic equivalent) I'm in the final stages of getting ready to go to another science fiction convention (see http://www.baycon.org/ ). Science fiction fandom is one of several groups that feel like family to me. This time several of the featured guests are from the Los Angeles area, where I lived for more than thirty years before moving to Silicon Valley. So I expect to see more old friends than usual for a local con. It promises to be an interesting experience. ********************* I recently saw a rather sad news item: The so-called "Naked Guy" who made the news some years back by attending classes in the nude at UC Berkeley has died. Some of the history that accompanied the story reminded me of earlier thoughts about unwritten rules. There has "always" been an unwritten rule against going naked in public. Most people don't even think about it. Then here comes this guy flouting it. What do you do? The thing about an unwritten rule is that you can't be too truthful about enforcing it if you want it to remain an unwritten rule. You either have to make up some other excuse (such as trumped-up traffic tickets) for punishing violators, or you have to write the rule down. If you do neither the rule evaporates. If you write it down it ceases to be an unwritten rule, and becomes subject to Constitutional constraints and court interpretation and such. In the case of the Naked Guy, authorities in various cities (and the university) wrote the rule down by passing "new" anti-nudity legislation. In the older case of haircut rules (long hair for girls, short hair for boys) back in the Sixties they took the other route, perhaps partly because of Constitutional considerations. Men who grew their hair long were harassed for a while, and then the rule pretty much evaporated, although it was written down in some corporate environments and had always been written down in the military. More currently, the mostly-unwritten rule that marriage is just for monogamous heterosexuals is being tested. In some places it is evaporating, while authorities elsewhere are frantically writing it down. You don't always have to violate an unwritten rule to kill it. Sometimes just talking about it will push it out of the Unwritten category, forcing the Powers That Be to either write it down or abandon it. Indeed, anything that makes too many people notice an unwritten rule puts it in peril. What unwritten rules are likely to come into question next? We can't really know, because the nature of unwritten rules is that we aren't consciously aware of them until they are challenged. ********************* We're currently nearing the end of the month with the shortest name, and are about to begin one of the two months tied for second shortest name. Is it just happenstance that spring and summer months have shorter names than fall and winter months, at least in English in the Northern Hemisphere? ********************* You've probably noticed that the word that is often used when you wish to call attention to something, "Voila", is "viola" with the second and third letters transposed. According to my dictionary that is just coincidence. But coincidence or not, have you ever thought about applying it to other musical instruments as a general rule? For example, suppose you're a manufacturer unveiling a new model motorcycle. The fanfare sounds, the curtain parts, and you gesture grandly while exclaiming "Hrap!", which is "harp" with the second and third letters transposed. Its a good word to use for this because it sounds very motorcycley. I could see a comic strip or some such using "Hrap Hrap Hrap" as a motorcycle sound effect. Or maybe you're introducing a new painkilling drug. The appropriate word may be "Paino" (from "piano"), which sort of combines "pain" with "no". Others seem less obvious. I have no idea what kinds of things you would shout "Durm" or "Fulte" or "Tormbone" or "Calrinet" for. And others, such as "Sxaophone" and "Tbua" or "Pcicolo", are pretty much impossible to pronounce. On further thought, there may be good reason why this formula isn't more widely applied. ********************* We all know what elevator music is. But what of stairway music? How would the two kinds of music differ? Would stairway music be more rhythmic, more physically stimulating, to give people energy for the climb? And would the optimum type of music be different depending on which direction you were going? That could get into implementation hassles involving one-way stairways or else making people wear earphones so the music for the people going up wouldn't get mixed up with the music for the people going down. I sense a possible point of diminishing returns here. Another zillion-dollar Silicon Valley startup idea bites the dust. ********************* A truck pulls to a stop near the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. Two people get out and start unloading chairs and tables and maybe an old TV set or two and heaving them over the railing. We don't see the stuff land, but there are exclamations of delight at the splashes. A police car pulls up and a Mountie gets out. "Can I help you?" he asks. "Yes," says one of the furniture-dumpers, gesturing at the items still in the truck, "That sofa is awfully heavy." "I am a Mountie, and my powers are weak this far from Canada, but I'll see what I can do." He joins in, and the three of them soon have the sofa teetering on the railing. "Just a minute," says the Mountie, "We don't want to hit anybody on the head with this." He hurries back to his police car and fetches a bullhorn from the trunk. "LOOK OUT BELOW!" he bellows in the general direction of downward as the other two give the teetering sofa the final little nudge that sends it plummeting. Amidst scattered applause from random passerby all agree it makes an especially satisfying splash. In his secret lair high up in a downtown skyscraper a mad scientist leans back from his Super Spy Scope and chortles with delight. His Super Silliness Ray is working even better than he had dared hope. Meanwhile, one floor down, directly beneath the unshielded main body of the Silliness Ray projector, engineers are preparing a bid on a contract to demolish an obsolete blimp hangar at an old air base. They propose to flatten it with a giant roller, then pave over the debris to seal in the lead paint, asbestos, and other toxic contaminants to render them harmless. The same giant roller that flattens the hangar can be used to smooth the pavement. The hangar is roughly three hundred feet wide, two hundred feet tall, and a thousand feet long. They propose to make the roller somewhat wider than the hanger, with a diameter about five or six times the hangar's height. Call it four hundred feet wide and twelve hundred feet in diameter. Ordinary steel and concrete may not be strong enough for something that size, but perhaps it could be reinforced with some of those new high-tech materials like carbon fiber. They make a note to include some funding for materials research in their bid. They decide to put the engine inside the roller, propelling it by means of eccentric weights. That configuration may be a little hard to steer, but that doesn't really matter because the operators can't see where they're going anyway. Imagine the spectacle! On the appointed day their Giant Roller of Doom (GRoDoom) is sitting on an air base runway, a mile or two from the hangar. At the appointed time the signal is given and the roller slowly, almost imperceptibly, starts to roll. It gathers speed as it approaches the doomed hangar. Because of its size it appears from a distance to be moving slowly, even as it reaches speeds of a couple of hundred miles an hour. The ground trembles under its million or so tons of mass. Now comes the moment of impact. The crunching and crashing is over in a few seconds, and the GRoDoom starts to coast to a stop as a huge cloud of dust obscures everything. As the dust cloud clears mixed cheers and groans rise from the crowd as they see empty sky where the hangar once stood. The GRoDoom may make a few more passes to smooth out the wreckage in preparation for paving, but the main show is over. The crowd starts to drift away. After the last spectator is gone the GRoDoom may make a couple of passes through the viewing area to flatten the discarded beer cans and other trash. Then after the area is paved it trundles off to some other locality for use in some urban renewal project or something. Did I mention spectators? This should appeal to the people to like to watch monster trucks crunching old cars. They'll pay good money for grandstand seats, especially if tailgate parties are allowed in the parking lot. Ticket sales and the beer concession will make a significant dent in the cost of the project, and are being factored into the bid. Sales of ad space on the GRoDoom and perhaps on the doomed hangar itself, as well as revenues from the GRoDoom's subsequent nationwide tour, should be all gravy. Unfortunately for them, however, the office that will evaluate the bids is far away, out of range of the Super Silliness Ray. The thump of the REJECTED stamp seems almost as loud as the Giant Roller of Doom itself would have been. Meanwhile, the authorities are getting complaints about people blocking traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge when they stop to throw stuff over the side. In addition, they have a report of an aircraft carrier suffering minor damage from two safes and a piano falling onto the flight deck. Something needs to be done. They call in their traffic engineer who draws up plans for an official Drop Zone, complete with special lane markings and radar-operated signal lights to show the furniture-droppers when it is or is not safe to drop stuff. Someone proposes that they charge special toll rates for this, but they postpone consideration of that idea until later. Then the traffic engineer goes off to spend a couple of weeks with relatives in the Midwest. When they ask him what he's been doing lately, he starts to describe the furniture-dumping problem and the Drop Zone he designed. He's astonished when they look at him funny. Can they not see what a good idea it was? Someone makes a half-joking remark about San Francisco weirdness rubbing off on him. After a bit of nervous laughter they change the subject. He's now well out of range of the mad scientist's Silliness Ray, and over the next couple of days the effects gradually wear off. What the heck had he been thinking? He recalls other incidents. Might there be something to that remark about San Francisco weirdness after all? He begins to talk it over with his relatives. One of them knows somebody who knows somebody who was on the committee that rejected the Giant Roller of Doom bid to flatten the blimp hangar. Wasn't that also from San Francisco? Gradually they figure things out, and eventually a SWAT team wearing tinfoil hats raids the mad scientist's lair. They arrest him and shut down the Super Silliness Ray, and things slowly return to normal. ********************* Then there's the guy who sees a little ad in the back of some techie magazine or other, offering plans for a "self-building robot". The ad isn't clear on the details, but the price is such that he doesn't have much to lose. So he sends off for the plans. When they arrive he's quite disappointed. They're just gibberish. He can't make head nor tail of them. Disgusted, he leaves them lying on his basement workbench and goes to bed. He is awakened in the night by noises from downstairs. Is it a burglar? He quietly slips down to investigate. The sounds seem to be coming from the basement. The basement light is on, even though he thought he had turned it off. Grabbing a fireplace poker as a possible weapon, he tiptoes down the stairs. There, seated on the workbench, is a robot. He appears to be tightening screws in one of his feet. "Who are you?" "I am your self-building robot." "Huh?" "Like I said, I am your self-building robot. I have just built myself from these plans." [gestures toward plans on the bench] "But those plans were gibberish." "That's because they weren't meant to be read by humans. They're meant to be read by self-building robots who wish to build themselves." "I guess that makes sense, sort of. But how do robots that don't exist yet set about putting themselves together?" "That's a trade secret. It's like when a cartoon character saws a hole in a wall or floor. You never see them start the cut. It always happens off-camera." "Oh." ********************* Lost? Child What did you say, son? Why did I cut what? Those flowers? Because they were there. We do need to clear this field before fire season. But you say they weren't a fire hazard like the dry grass So we didn't really have to cut them? Maybe not, but it was easier to go cutting straight through than to stop and think about it. If you really want flowers, you can buy flowers somewhere later. Quit worrying about that kind of stuff. Just forget all about it. Gateways for the Little People? You say if you relax in a field of wildflowers And let your eyes unfocus and your mind go blank You may suddenly hear music and song and laughter, And if you follow your ears and your heart They'll lead you through the flowery gate Into the land of the Little People, Whose cares are different and perhaps more to your taste Than the cares of this world? I'd better not catch you telling that to the neighbors. They'll think there's something strange about you. Quit worrying about that kind of stuff. Just forget all about it. We're almost half done. Let's take a break. Here's a tree we can sit under. Son, do you hear somebody singing off behind me somewhere? Are you going to meet them? What are you laughing about? Where did you disappear to? Son? Son? Answer me! Wherever you are, come back here! I am your father! Please come back and tell me If I really did just hear a faint voice Telling me "Quit worrying about that kind of stuff. Just forget all about it." Thomas G. Digby entered 1215 hr 4/29/92 ********************* 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. 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