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 #158 New Moon of November 9, 2007 Contents copyright 2007 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 thing on my mind right now is a new Web site I'm setting up: http://www.plergb.com/ Right now it just has pointers to my WELL site, including an old writeup about the word Plergb. It's also hosting the Silicon Soapware email lists. But I do have plans in mind for other stuff to put there later. Stay tuned. ********************* Another item of note is the recent end of Daylight Saving time. Now activities and events that had been starting in evening twilight, or even by the last bits of the day's sunlight, have been starting in full darkness. That makes winter feel a lot closer, even though the weather has been warmer than usual. On the other hand, mornings aren't as gloomy as they had been in recent weeks. Another thought related to Daylight Saving: The extra hour we get in the fall is not the same as the hour we lost last spring. It's an hour earlier. We lose the hour from 2 am to 3 am in the spring, and in return we get an extra hour from 1 am to 2 am in the fall. Does this matter in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. Most people, even those who are not asleep at the moment of change, probably don't even notice. But it may still be an interesting bit of trivia. Or maybe not. ********************* There's a coffee house near here that has an Open Mike every Monday night. Most of the performers are musicians, but there are a few poets, including me. The nature of coffee houses is such that there will be distractions: People ordering food and drink, occasional noise from the espresso machine, and so on. I'm usually OK with that. But one recent night was much worse than usual. While I was up there reading I noticed more than the usual number of people talking in the back of the room. People at one table even had a laptop playing some kind of little movie or something, complete with audio. And then there was some guy yakking on a cell phone, almost loud enough for me to follow his side of the conversation. All in all, it left me with the feeling that nobody was really interested in me. I mentioned this to one of the organizers later, and she said that people were indeed interested. But it sure didn't feel that way while I was trying to perform. Now it occurs to me that I may have been witnessing the birth of the next Silicon Valley wonder that nobody notices at the time but which later ends up changing the world. Years will pass and I will have pretty much forgotten the incident. But then they'll suddenly go public, or maybe some big corporation will buy them out, and as part of the hoopla one of the founders will reminisce about how they started in the back of a coffee house with some crazy old man reading weird poetry at them while they were trying to put a presentation together. Then if I'm lucky I'll see the news reports and remember ... On the other hand, it could have been just another Silicon Valley dream that is full of bright promises today but, come tomorrow, will quietly fade away and never be heard from again. There's no way to tell, at least for now. All I can do is wait. ********************* And now this just sort of popped into my head: The founders of some Silicon Valley startup are in the middle of a corporate meeting when an unannounced visitor walks in. He is dressed in a black robe, hooded so that his face is in darkness, and is carrying a scythe. He announces that he is taking over the company and that everybody else has been laid off and can go home now. He may have personal appointments with some of them later, but that's not on today's agenda and he doesn't want to discuss it right now. Then as the last of them walk out the door they notice that the potted plants in the reception area have withered. It's time to set that dream aside and try to dream up something new. ********************* The bit about people talking during poetry readings and such reminds me of another thought I've had now and then: Ejection seats in theaters. If someone is talking or crinkling candy wrappers or letting their cell phone ring or otherwise doing something undesirable, one of the ushers or managers or whoever pushes the button, and BOOM, the malefactor is out of there. Such a thing wouldn't work well outside of cartoons, but it's still a tempting thought. ********************* Do they have rainbows on other planets? If so, what do they look like? If we think in terms of an observer standing on the surface looking up into the sky, prospects for seeing rainbows on other worlds in our solar system aren't too good. First, you need enough of an atmosphere to make weather in which some sort of liquid, whether it be water or methane or something else, can form clouds and fall as rain. This atmosphere has to be clear enough to allow sunlight to shine on those rain clouds. The liquid droplets in the clouds also need to be transparent enough for sunlight to bounce around inside them before coming back out. And there has to be something like solid ground for some astronaut or colonist or whatever to stand on to see the rainbow. We can rule out Mercury and our moon because they don't have any atmosphere to speak of. Mars's atmosphere is too thin for water to stay liquid, except possibly at the lowest elevations. Venus is too cloudy, while the gas giants don't have any place for our hypothetical observer to stand. Titan has an atmosphere which may rain liquid methane, but again that atmosphere appears to be too cloudy. Thus Earth appears to be the only place is our solar system where you can stand on the ground and look up at the sky and (when conditions are right) see rainbows. Although Mars and Titan may offer some faint hope, rainbows on those worlds would be extremely rare compared to rainbows on Earth. So what if you relax the rules a bit so the observer can be in some sort of aircraft or spacecraft? Then Venus and the gas giants become possible rainbow viewing sites. But what would those rainbows look like? For example, would the radius of a methane-based rainbow's curve be the same as that of the water-based rainbows on Earth? Would the colors be in the same order? And if you're out by the gas giants, where the apparent width of the Sun is smaller, would the colors be more distinct and not blur into each other as much as they do on Earth? Then what if you start considering possible worlds orbiting other suns? I'm not expert enough to say. But there ought to be some interesting possibilities if you know where and how to look. ********************* There's also the complementary question: What kinds of atmospheric phenomena might we see on other worlds that you never see on Earth? ********************* If rainbows are as rare on other planets as I think they are, seeing one would be cause for celebration. And, at least for me, celebrations often include blowing bubbles. So how would one blow bubbles on other planets, assuming one wants to do it outdoors? For one thing, the atmospheres of most other planets aren't compatible with human lungs, so you'll need a bubble-blowing machine. But then what kind of bubble fluid do you put in the machine? Based on what kinds of atmospheres the other planets in our system do or don't have, you'll probably be either on the surface of Titan or on some kind of balloon or something floating in the atmosphere of one of the gas giants, and there's a good chance the ambient "air" will be too cold for water to be liquid. Thus your bubble solution is likely to be based on methane or ammonia or something similar rather than water. You'll probably need to add some kind of surfactant or something to the liquid to make it usable for bubble-blowing. Now we're getting outside my area of expertise. Has anyone who knows more chemistry than I researched this? ********************* "Why should I accept this check? It's written on the Andromeda Galaxy Bank. It'll take millions of years to clear, assuming that bank exists at all." "Think of it this way: If it bounces, it'll be our descendents' problem, not ours." ********************* Every now and then I see a news item about police solving some decades-old crime, often by using DNA matching or some other such technology that didn't exist back then. So imagine one such case where they track down the prime suspect, only to find that he's dead. Well, sort of dead. He's on ice at one of those cryonics places. So what do they do now? Forget the whole thing? Ask the cryonics people to put some kind of hold on him, so they get notified if and when he's about to be revived? Other? It may well depend on the personal beliefs of the top brass, especially if the cryonics people haven't managed to revive anyone yet. ********************* While we have other worlds on our minds ... Incident Along Fantasy Way Projections Last night I went to the Planetarium. They were doing a travelogue: "The heavens as seen from Oz, Trantor, Middle Earth, Lankhmar, Hollywood, And other legendary places." As an added attraction they had images of UFO's: Lights, disks, streaks, and various other forms Of mysterious heavenly apparitions. But something departed from the script -- A spot of light grew and grew and grew Until a door opened and a Thing emerged. "Our home planet is overcrowded," it said, "And we want you to put a brighter bulb in your projector To make our world larger and roomier." "But that would exceed our budget And besides you don't have tickets." A bureaucrat forever. Suddenly, with a flurry of tentacles into a projector previously unnoticed, The attendant was extinguished And with a quick change of slides A more cooperative one created. Request granted, farewell, and off into the artificial night Leaving me to wonder: Which projector am I coming from? Thomas G. Digby written 0200 8/01/74 entered 1205 4/09/92 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --