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 #192 New Moon of August 9, 2010 Contents copyright 2010 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. ********************* One big piece of news among many of the people I know is the court decision on Proposition 8. A Federal court has ruled that the State of California cannot discriminate against marriage license applicants on the basis of sexual orientation. The ruling is almost certain to be appealed, and of course the appeals court could rule either way. But if you think about what attitudes toward homosexuality were like back in the 1950's and 60's it's amazing that it's even gotten this far. From the court decision (available on the Web): CONCLUSION Proposition 8 fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. Because California has no interest in discriminating against gay men and lesbians, and because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional. I can recall a time when "the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples" would not even have been considered a matter for debate. People would have just said "Of course opposite-sex couples are superior" and considered the matter settled. The other questions raised at the trial would have gotten similarly quick dismissive answers. Nowadays, although many people still feel that way, many do not. Now there is actual public debate about such matters. That is a bigger change than even I would have imagined back then. ********************* This general time period is also the 65th anniversary of the events leading up to the end of World War II. Again, people can look up the details. I have fragmentary childhood memories of it: Someone was going around door to door selling newspapers with the headline "VICTORY IN JAPAN". There was the sound of many car horns off in the distance, apparently honking in celebration somewhere downtown. My mother took me along to do the usual grocery shopping, but the stores were all closed. We just had crackers and such for dinner that night. I really didn't understand what all of this meant, but I do remember those fragments. We'd been living in Oakland, California at the time, since Dad was stationed near there. Then he got discharged from the Army Air Corps and we drove cross-country from California to Grandma's house in South Carolina. I don't remember the details, but my parents said it took a week. I do recall sleeping in the car at least once. Other times we stayed at hotels. This is one of those things the younger generation won't have experienced, at least not in the same way. The Interstate system hadn't been built yet, so this was almost three thousand miles of mostly two-lane roads. And there were no such things as seat belts, at least not for cars. I spent much of the time standing up, leaning on the back of the front seat. When I sat down I wasn't high enough to see any of the scenery, so I stood. People nowadays would say that letting a child stand up in a moving car is too dangerous, but we didn't think much about that kind of thing back then. I also remember my parents throwing trash and garbage out the car windows. That was sort of accepted. And it might not have been all that bad. First, there were fewer cars on the road than there are today. And second, refuse was more biodegradable. What wasn't food waste was pretty much all paper. We didn't have much in the way of plastics. Another thing: Dad smoked back then, although he later quit. He smoked at home, and he smoked in the car. I recall him explaining how the cigarette lighter in the car knew when to pop out after you pushed it in (something about a metal part expanding from the heat to release the latch). And I recall him blowing smoke rings in the living room at home. Nobody ever complained about the smell, or about second-hand smoke being toxic. Just another example of how things have changed. ********************* At the Time Travel Academy "How do you know when to water your plants? With mine I never seem to be able to tell when they need it." "Simple. I wait until they die from lack of water, then go back a couple of days and water them." ********************* I've wondered what would happen if someone with more money than sense decided that the natives in the Amazon jungle would be better off if it was easier for them to make music. His first thought is to parachute several planeloads of pianos all over the place. Natives would happen upon them, discover more or less by chance that hitting the keys made musical sounds, and eventually notice that if they hit certain keys in a certain order the result would remind them of their tribe's traditional songs. Eventually they would all be virtuosos. But other people point out problems in this scheme. First, a piano depends on gravity to return the hammers to their resting position after a note has been sounded, so it won't work if it isn't right-side up. When you're dropping pianos into a jungle from an airplane it's difficult to control how they land. Maybe you can strap them to pallets or whatever like they do with military vehicles, but even that may not work in a jungle or forest. Second, a piano is rather fragile. The moving parts are traditionally made of wood, although it may be possible to substitute plastic. Wood might warp in the humid Amazon jungle, and the place is crawling with termites and other wood-destroying insects and fungi and such. And even if the wood doesn't rot or warp or get eaten, the steel strings might rust, or at least go out of tune over time. So dropping pianos there is probably not practical. And even if you solved those problems, what if the natives' music doesn't conform to modern Western musical scales? So let's go to the opposite extreme: How about solar-powered theremins? They can be made small and rugged, so dropping them into a jungle from airplanes isn't a problem. Likewise they can be protected against humidity and insects and such. There would be batteries to charge, but as long as the solar cells got a few hours of sunlight every day that would be taken care of more or less automatically. The theremin is not limited to any one set of musical scales, so you don't need to know anything about native musical traditions. However, playing the theremin is not very intuitive. It may be easy enough to stumble onto the fact that waving your hands around in front of it causes it to make noises, but it takes quite a bit of skill and practice to get anything resembling music out of one. Even if the intended users aren't scared off by the sound the first time they happen upon one, they're not likely to think of the theremin in terms of music. Slide trombones, however, might be a happy medium. The trombone does have moving parts, but not many. There are no solar panels that need sunlight. And it's not that hard to figure out. Once people stumble onto the trick of blowing into the mouthpiece with their lips just so, and notice how moving the slide makes the notes sound higher or lower, it should be easy, or at least not as hard as with most other instruments. It's not tied to any particular culture's musical scales. And even after they get good at playing music, they can still use trombones to make weird noises to frighten neighboring tribes if that need arises. And a slide trombone is light enough not to need a very big parachute. So what's not to like about it? ********************* You devil hard-boiled eggs by chopping up the yolks and mixing them with spices and such. Deviled ham is similar. But can you devil Devil's Food Cake? And how do you angel something? ********************* Someone at a science fiction convention had set up a model of the solar system more or less to scale. As I recall it was one ten-billionth (10^-10) of actual size. The Sun was about the size of a grapefruit. Earth was the size of a large grain of sand and was maybe forty or fifty feet or so down the hall. The outer planets were in distant parts of the hotel, or maybe out in the parking lot, if he had them at all. He didn't have any other stars in his setup, but the nearest ones would have been in Atlanta or Chicago or some such place (the main exhibit was in California). A model of our galaxy at that scale would be several tens of millions of miles across. It would stretch from Earth to the orbit of Mars or Venus. And models of the most distant objects known would be well out into interstellar space, roughly a light-year away. He didn't have any of those either. ********************* Remember analog records and turntables? With most of them it was easy to play a record at the "wrong" speed. You could also disengage the motor and rotate the turntable backward by hand. I would sometimes do this kind of thing deliberately just for the fun of it. Most CD players and such don't allow that, although you can get those effects with some audio-editing software. Something got me to wondering about player-piano rolls. Did people a generation or two before me sometimes deliberately load them "wrong", playing the music backwards and/or swapping high and low notes? ********************* Another question: Does wanting to play around with such things as playing records backwards, or at speeds other than the one intended by their makers, count as Fair Use under copyright law? What about searching for subliminal secret messages and such? It seems to me like those kinds of things should be Fair Use. After all, if I buy a copy of a record I would think I should have a right to know what I'm buying, includung stuff like subliminal messages. But considering how some record companies and other copyright holders have been acting around matters related to copyrights and copy protection, you never know. ********************* Will You Write Me? I can't see them or hear them or smell them, But I know they're there: Unwritten poems, waiting for some poet to give them form. There's one at the end of that row of trees, Leading my gaze off into vague infinities Of memories and daydreams. And there's another lying in the gutter with that old tennis ball, Perhaps reminiscing about better days and laughing children While mourning the glory that was not to be At Wimbledon. And there are always several up in the sky, Floating around with the birds Or the clouds Or the stars. They wait, unseen, unheard, Until the right poet approaches. Then one will leap into the writer's brain, Or maybe sneak in on foggy cat feet And slowly make its presence known over time. I'm usually not the poet they want. But now and then I am honored When one does choose me. -- Tom Digby First draft 22:11 08/07/2003 Revised 14:30 08/09/2003 Revised 17:52 08/14/2003 Revised 13:40 10/04/2003 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. 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