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 #214 New Moon of May 20, 2012 Contents copyright 2012 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 big news for this New Moon was a solar eclipse. People somewhat north and east of here saw an annular eclipse, while this area got a pretty good partial eclipse. I'm assuming that anyone who doesn't know what all that means knows how to look it up on the Internet or their phone or whatever. I feel much less need to write a paragraph or so of explanation than I would have felt a few years ago. If I'm writing about something I expect only a few of my readers to be familiar with I'll still do a brief explanation, along with a Wikipedia article title or other pointer to more detailed information. But the more I expect people to know about something, the more likely I am to assume that those who don't will at least know how to paste unfamiliar words into a search engine or whatever. In days of yore when a paragraph of explanation might save people a trip to the library to look something up in a physical book, typing up that explanatory paragraph just sort of felt like the natural thing to do. But now, when I'd only be saving people a few keystrokes or mouse clicks or whatever, it feels much less necessary. Besides, for most subjects the explanations available online are likely to be better or more complete than whatever I might come up with. Of course there may be downsides to this attitude. For one thing, what used to be a more or less linear path through my thoughts on whatever I'm writing about can turn into the proverbial maze of twisty little passages. Readers can vanish into the depths of Wikipedia, and as yet the technology does not permit me to send them a virtual Saint Bernard dog with a little cask of virtual brandy around its neck to lure them back here. Maybe I'll be able to do that the next time a solar eclipse comes this close to wherever I happen to be as I write about it? It hadn't occurred to me to even wonder about such a thing until I typed the preceding paragraph, but now I'm starting to wonder how it might be done. Even today, the browser's Back button can let wandering readers retrace their steps back to whatever they got distracted from, as long as they are still in more or less the same browser. But they have to remember to want to return. It's not like a Saint Bernard plaintively meowing at them in hopes that the cognitive dissonance of a dog meowing like a cat will lure them back to my site. No, we're not up to sending virtual Saint Bernards yet, but who knows what they'll come up with next. ********************* The big news in the paper and on the radio is the Facebook IPO. That reminds me of when one of the companies that produces Putri-DOS went public a few years back. The good news is that first-day trading pushed the volume on the exchange to record levels. The bad news is that almost all of it was short sales. ********************* Recently one of my credit cards came up for renewal. As part of this they asked me some survey questions. One question was "How likely are you to recommend this card to a friend?" I gave an answer near the middle of their "likely" / "not likely" scale. Then they asked why I gave that answer. I replied that the question is not really applicable because the people I hang out with don't often discuss this sort of thing. Therefore they're not likely to ask about my credit cards and I'm not likely to recommend any particular card to them. If the subject of credit-card horror stories comes up I don't have any (knock wood), but that's the closest I'll come to recommending any card. And even then I may not happen to mention what brand of card I have. Are most people in the habit of talking about their most and least favorite brands of credit cards? ********************* Back on the eclipse, I'm reminded of the projector I built for an eclipse that was going to occur just before sunset on the day I was to host a party. I was hoping early-arriving guests would enjoy it. It used an old camera lens casting an image into a projector lens, with the combination producing a solar image several inches across. It worked great, even showing sunspots. Problem was, it was cloudy that day. The whole show got clouded out. Some people got to see it by driving up into the snowy mountains, but I was not among them. At least the weather around here today is supposed to be clear. ********************* Imagine a universe where one of the three dimensions we are used to is curled up on a scale of maybe a kilometer. The other two dimensions are open, like they appear to be here. Other than that one difference, the physical laws and conditions there are similar enough to those here to allow humans who go there (by some unspecified means) to survive in reasonable comfort, at least for a while. Is this what a traveler going there might see? Your ship appears in a region of that space distant from any objects that would pose an immediate danger. For convenience, the ship is oriented so that the curled-up dimension appears as what you think of as up and down relative to the ship's cabin. The other two dimensions, which we may designate East-West and North-South, are uncurled. Again, this is an arbitrary choice for ease of description. The ship is in free fall and could just as easily have been oriented some other way. You look out through a viewport. You see darkness, broken by bright vertical lines that are this universe's equivalent of stars. They give just enough light to let you see any nearby objects, but not enough to blind you. You hear a beep from the control panel. The radar reports two unidentified ships, one a kilometer "above" you and the other a kilometer "below". They appear to be similar to the ship you are in. After a moment you realize that they are your ship, seen by light that has made the one-kilometer journey around the curled-up dimension of this space. You put on your spacesuit and exit the ship. As you do so, you glance up and down and see yourself exiting the other two ships. After you get some distance away from the ship you can see that there are not just three ships (the one you came out of and its immediate neighbors), but an infinite line of them, one kilometer apart, off into the distance in both directions. You realize that there is also an infinite line of spacesuited figures, even if you can't see the more distant ones because the closest neighbors are in the way. You may be able to verify this if the ship is equipped with video cameras. You may be tempted to jet over to one of the figures and say hello, but if you do the figure retreats just as fast as you approach. You'll never be able to catch one another, and never be able to get completely away from one another. You may experience a moment of panic as you realize you may have lost track of which one of the infinite line of ships is yours. But then you realize it doesn't matter. They're all the same ship. You've just gone around the short dimension to approach it from a different direction. If you have a spouse or other romantic partner along you may have a moment of paranoia about one of you going to talk to the neighbors and losing track of who is which, and whether there may be cheating going on. But again you realize there's nothing to worry about. There are really just one of you and one of your partner, seen by light that has gone around and around however many times. Now it's time to get to work. You take some small rocks or something and start moving them around, experimenting with gravity and orbits and such. Your first few are quite small, maybe the size of a soccer ball down to golf-ball size or even marble size. If you are careful and your equipment is working well, you can set them up like a model of a solar system, with the smaller ones orbiting around the larger. You observe that as long as your experimental area is less than a few meters across gravity obeys something very close to the inverse-square law you are accustomed to at home. If you look up and down you can see copies of your experiments being performed by the copies of you above and below. But since the experimental setup is quite compact, these copies do not affect each other to any significant degree. At this scale this space is effectively three-dimensional. You hunt up larger objects, or maybe start piling up smaller ones to make one big one. As the diameter of this cluster gets bigger, the gravity of the adjacent instances starts distorting it into an elongated shape. Eventually they merge into an infinite column of material. At first the diameter of this column may vary periodically, a vestige of the original discrete objects that merged to make the column, but as you continue to add mass this smooths out. This is why the stars appear as lines of light rather than as points. You do some more experimenting, putting smaller objects in orbit around the column. This time gravity decreases as the inverse first power of distance, rather that the inverse square. At this scale the space is effectively two-dimensional. You go back to your initial small experiment. If there is nothing in the vicinity to disturb your readings, you find that even though it acts three-dimensional when you are close to it, once you get far enough away to experience the gravitational attraction of multiple instances with no one of them dominating, the overall setup acts two-dimensional. At this point you've done enough playing around for a while. You board your ship and head for home. This may all have implications that I may not be expert enough to get into involving things like whether stars would actually shine, the possibility that an inverse first-power gravity field may lead to things collapsing into black holes, and so on. But I think that if you ignore that for the moment, this is a fairly good first approximation of how curled-up dimensions might work. ********************* Imagine a toy battle tank, maybe shoe-box size or a little smaller, crawling along the floor on rubber treads. Now imagine putting a computer printer mechanism inside, so it prints your message or image or whatever onto whatever surface it's crawling on. That might be useful. Now imagine putting a handle on it, and making it small enough to hold with one hand. Now it can print on walls and ceilings and whatever other non-horizontal surfaces you can hold it up against as it crawls along. That might be even more useful. As I pondered this I began to suspect someone had probably thought of it already, although if they had I hadn't heard about it yet. So I did a Web search on printer "print on walls" and got at least one bulls-eye: http://www.thecabal.org/gurps/rareitems/inkbug.html which has a modification date of September 10, 2001. In other words, the idea has been around for more than a decade and nobody seems to have done anything major with it. I'm a little surprised at the seeming lack of interest. I also found a number of mentions of hooking up a paintball gun to function like an ink-jet printer. Nobody seems to have done much with that either, even though it could be useful for temporary emergency signs and such. So what other nifty things have been thought of and then forgotten? ********************* There had recently been rumors of an impending attack on some part of the Internet that hadn't been attacked all that often before. Then the predicted date came and went with nothing significant happening. That led me to thoughts of what might be called a "Cry Wolf" attack: Spread rumors about an impending threat so security people waste resources preparing to defend their systems. It may not matter all that much whether the supposed threat ever actually materializes. The cost to the system owners is mainly in anticipating the threat as opposed to having anything actually happen. ********************* I heard on the news a while back that AT&T was getting out of the Yellow Pages business. They've spun that off into a separate company, and have sold it. So are the days of this one numbered? The Wind Calling It's Phone Book Delivery Day: Yellow Pages await 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 And will children eventually be asking their parents what a "phone book" is? Generations of Memories At the poetry reading, a woman half my age Waxes nostalgic about railroads: Fond memories of streamlined diesels. The steam-belching monsters of my childhood Are only the stuff of legend, As unreal as fire-breathing dragons. This leads me to wonder: When her children and grandchildren are doing poetry of their own, What version of this poem will she write? -- Tom Digby Original 09:04 10/07/2002 Edited 14:51 10/07/2002 Edited 14:19 10/10/2002 ********************* 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 in the copy you received. 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 --