Silicon Soapware #239

[bubbleblower]

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                            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 #239
                        New Moon of May 28, 2014


Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative 
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  See the Creative 
Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. 

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

May has given way to June.  Back when I was young that meant we were 
within a day or two one way or the other of the end of the school year.  
It was a time to look forward to being able to relax and enjoy 
unstructured time.

Now I tend to think of spring as more of a time when the world sort of 
wakes up.

For the past few months days have been getting longer and longer.  We're 
now at a time when the days will still get a little bit longer before 
they start getting shorter again, but they're almost as long as they're 
ever going to get.

It has also been a time of gradually noticing that I was no longer having 
to deal with cold weather.  Just a couple of weeks ago it finally felt 
like it was time to turn my heater pilot off for the summer.

Now I'm thinking about how it's going to start getting hot soon.  Being 
too hot can be worse than being cold.  I like the evening light, even if 
I don't like the heat, but I won't really be rid of the heat until the 
days have gotten significantly shorter again.

I go through this every year.  I'm reminded of that Sixties rock song 
"The Beat Goes On" (Sonny & Cher).


                          *********************

"The hotel our convention was at is doing some kind of weird art exhibit.  
I don't know what it's called but it's some kind of surrealistic 
installation that looks like random furniture and such floating overhead 
in the atrium."

"That's just random furniture and such."

"I would think they could have come up with a better title than that."

"It's not really art.  It's storage."

"Huh?"

"You know how some conventions fill up the hotel's exhibit space and end 
up having parties and such in regular sleeping rooms?  Many of those 
party hosts would like to take the beds out of their rooms so they can 
have more room for people to stand around at their parties."

"Yes, but hotels seem reluctant to do that for some reason."

"One big reason is that they don't have space to store the stuff they 
take out of the rooms.  Or at least they didn't, until recently."

"So what happened?"

"Our convention hotel had a UFO convention, and someone managed to get a 
bunch of anti-gravity stickers from some advanced civilization or other.  
Even though they're beyond Earth technology, they're quite common on 
quite a few planets so the hotel was able to get several hundred of them 
for just a few bucks."

"Anti-gravity stickers?"

"Yes.  You stick one on an object and it neutralizes the effect of 
gravity on that object, so you can put it up in the air and it will just 
stay there.  So now they're using all that previously wasted overhead 
space in the atrium for storage."

"How do they get the things back?  They're too high to reach."

"There are a couple of hotel employees who are into fishing, and are 
pretty good with a rod and reel.  They just cast a hook (unbaited, so the 
furniture doesn't end up smelling like worms or rotten shrimp or 
whatever), snag the piece they want, and reel it in."

"Does anything ever go wrong?"

"One time they were moving a piano from one wing of the hotel to the 
other.  That normally takes two or three people or a fork lift or 
something, but someone thought that with a couple of those anti-gravity 
stickers one person would be able to handle it.  It went OK until he had 
to cross a courtyard, and a gust of wind came up at just the wrong time 
and the piano got away.  They still haven't found it."

"How far could it have gone?"

"Quite a ways.  Those stickers don't wear out the way helium leaks out of 
balloons, and since they don't depend on air density for lift there's no 
altitude limit like there is with balloons.  That piano could be halfway 
to the Moon by now."

"So posting LOST PIANO posters around the neighborhood probably won't do 
much good."

"Probably not.  And if this comes to the attention of the FAA or NASA or 
some other such agency the hotel could get in trouble.  So they've been 
keeping it quiet."

"That makes sense, even though I think it would be safer to put out 
warnings to airlines and people launching space missions and such to be 
on the lookout for it."


                          *********************

I recently bought an electric fan, and it came with a card to fill in and 
mail back to register the warranty.  One thing I noticed about the form 
is that it had a space to put your date of birth, and then farther down 
it had a set of boxes to check for your age group (18-24, 25-39, and so 
on).

So why do they need to ask your age if they already know your date of 
birth?  Can't they just calculate it?

Then the thought hit me: Time travelers.  Once you get into time travel 
there's no longer a simple relationship between your birth date and your 
age.

I don't know why time travelers would be especially likely to buy 
electric fans, but then maybe the company makes other things I'm not 
aware of that are of more interest to time travelers than electric fans 
are.  I don't recall seeing anything unusual in the store, but maybe the 
time travel stuff is in the back and you have to ask for it, using secret 
words only time travelers and store employees know.

So the next time you're in one of those big-box hardware stores, be on 
the lookout for customers asking weird questions full of seemingly 
nonsensical words or phrases.  They might be time travelers.


                          *********************

One of the suggestions I hear for saving water is to not flush the toilet 
for Number One: "If it's yellow, let it mellow.  If it's brown, flush it 
down."

That has a problem in that if too long a time goes by with nobody doing 
poo-poo, the accumulated pee can get rather unattractive.

A possible solution is to flip a coin: Heads you flush, tails you don't 
(always flushing for doo-doo).  That cuts down the average time stuff is 
likely to sit there without getting flushed, while still achieving about 
half the savings of the original proposal.

If you want to realize greater savings you can get fancy by throwing a D4 
or D6 and flushing only if it comes up a 1.  Anything beyond that gets 
into diminishing returns.


                          *********************

People on one social networking site who want to keep their real-world 
personal information private have taken to listing their location as 
Antarctica.  Those who don't want their age generally known (management 
doesn't seem to care as long as they're over 18) have been claiming the 
earliest birth date the software allows, which currently puts them in 
their mid-nineties.  That led me to thoughts of establishing old-age 
homes at the South Pole.

And then I got to thinking about zombies.

I would think that zombies wouldn't rot in Antarctica because of the 
cold.  So do they stay functional longer there?  Or has rotting flesh 
never been a problem?  Do they need actual muscle tissue to move, or is 
some other mechanism involved?

Zombies in the movies often look like their flesh is rotting away, but it 
doesn't seem to stop them from functioning.  So maybe moving them to the 
South Pole wouldn't make much difference.

On the other hand, a zombie with most of the tissues around its joints 
intact might freeze solid and be too stiff to move.  Has anyone done any 
tests on this?  Even if that doesn't immobilize them, freezing them in a 
block of ice should.  Either way, being able to freeze zombies may be 
useful.

Maybe people who don't want to become zombies after they die should go to 
Antarctica while they're still alive.  That way when they die they can be 
set outside to freeze and it won't matter if they become zombies or not 
because they won't be able to go around doing zombie-type stuff.

The only danger is global warming.  The first thing that will happen 
after the climate in Antarctica turns warm is that all those old-age 
homes full of people in their nineties will get too hot because they 
don't have air conditioning, and many residents will die sooner than they 
otherwise would.  Then when they stack the dead bodies outside they won't 
freeze.  They'll become active zombies.  And don't forget all those 
previously frozen zombies that will thaw and become active.

Meanwhile the ice cap will have melted, which will raise the sea level, 
and everybody everywhere else will be too busy dealing with that to worry 
about reports of zombies at the South Pole.  So once Antarctica has been 
warm long enough to grow trees the zombies will make canoes and sail 
north and ravage what's left of the rest of the world.

So if you're in any position where you may need to deal with global 
warming, put this on your list of things to check before you get canoes 
full of rotting zombies paddling in through your upstairs windows.

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!


                          *********************

                       Incident Along Fantasy Way

                           Convention Report


For a time I thought my Muse had deserted me.
But no, she had only gone to their convention
And she gave me a partial report.

The days were taken up with the official program:
Panels and seminars and papers 
On
"Estimating the Connectivity of Disparate Ideas"
And 
"New Techniques for the Management of Fertile Minds"
And
"The Topology of the Subconscious in Spaces of N Dimensions"
And so on, on and on and on,
Until at last,
The late evening social sessions.

Here were the constant arguments between the Muses
Of Crime
And of Punishment,
Juicy tidbits from the Muse of Gossip,
Rumors of parties hosted by the Muses of Sex
(Gay and straight and what-have-you),
The Muse of Animated Cartooning crying about hard times
And Saturday morning TV
And being promised help by the Muses
Of Electronic Design
And of Computer Programming.
Crowds held spellbound by the Muse of Witty Conversation,
And the bright child-fantasies of Muses
Of arts not yet invented.

And, over and through all, 
The Eternal Question,
About which even the gods can only speculate:
"Who inspires the Muses?"

                                   -- Thomas G. Digby
                                   written 0055 hr  9/09/74
                                   entered 2200 hr  2/08/92



                          *********************

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