Silicon Soapware #244

[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 #244
                      New Moon of October 23, 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.


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

About six months ago people I knew were joyfully chanting:

  Hooray, hooray, the first of May!
  Outdoor [sexual activity] begins today.

But I've never heard any mention of any sort of official end to that 
activity.  Now it's just about Halloween, but I am not hearing the likes 
of:

  Hear the mournful autumn wind!
  Outdoor [sexual activity] is at an end.

People are left to decide for themselves when to discontinue outdoor 
sexual activity.

I've encountered this kind of thing before.

When I was a child, living with my parents in a beach town that did a 
fair amount of tourist business, there would be a big Beach Opening 
festival every June, usually right after schools in the surrounding area 
had closed for the summer.

But there was no Beach Closing festival in the fall.  People just sort of 
quit going to the beach when it wasn't beach weather any more or when 
school started, whichever came first.

I've also noticed the opposite pattern, in which a season of some sort of 
activity just sort of sneaks up on people, builds to a climax, and then 
ends with a big celebration.  The year-end holiday shopping and 
decorating and carol-singing season, which starts building between 
Halloween and Thanksgiving and goes out with a bang on Christmas Day 
(with a few remnants hanging on until New Year's) is a prime example.

Some have tried to define an "official" start to that holiday season, but 
with limited success.

So a festive time with a well-defined beginning and a well-defined end 
seems to be the exception, at least in this society.


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

One of the local baseball teams made it to the World Series, and some 
local people decided to celebrate by driving their cars to a major street 
intersection, where they made the cars skid round and round, screeching 
tires and making great clouds of smoke.

They left when the cops showed up.  Apparently something about cars 
skidding round and round in major street intersections, screeching tires 
and making great clouds of smoke, is technically illegal.  So people who 
do such things tend to avoid cops.

Be that as it may, the news reports of all that activity got me to 
thinking about self-driving cars.  As they come from the factory they 
probably will refuse to go skidding round and round in major street 
intersections, screeching tires and making great clouds of smoke.  I like 
to imagine the request and refusal as a dialog somewhat like the scene in 
the movie "2001" where Hal refuses to open the pod bay doors, but I 
suspect it won't be quite like that.

Anyway, if you're a good enough computer hacker you might be able to 
overcome the obstacles and make your car do it anyway, but that will 
probably be technically illegal and you won't want to be around when the 
cops show up.

I suppose if you're good enough at computer hacking you could send your 
self-driving car out to your favorite street intersection to skid round 
and round and screech tires and make great clouds of smoke, while you 
stay far away with lots of witnesses so as to have an airtight alibi, but 
the cops have ways of figuring out who's really responsible for stuff 
like that, and once they figure out it was you you won't like what 
happens next.

So it may be just as well that self-driving cars won't really care who 
wins the World Series.


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

There's an election coming up, and some of the campaign rhetoric talks of 
some proposed laws putting too much power in the hands of a "politician".  
I was reminded of other elections in years past in which some faction 
railed against giving power to "bureaucrats".  That led me to wonder what 
the difference is between a "bureaucrat" and a "politician".

They probably aren't formally defined unless some agency somewhere is 
using them in official titles, which seems unlikely given the generally 
negative connotations of both terms.  But even if they aren't formally 
defined people claim to know one when they see one.

I'm thinking mainly about politicians and bureaucrats in government 
agencies.  Analogous beings exist in private industry, but the 
nomenclature is somewhat different.

Politicians and bureaucrats have some things in common.  They are both 
decision-makers, and even though the rules for making those decisions are 
usually spelled out in detail, there is often a gray area where the 
decision can go either way...

I could go on, but I'm starting to think that this is not one of the 
burning questions of the age.  It seemed to be worthy of thought at the 
outset, but as I trudge on through it seems less and less urgent.  Like 
many other people, even when I haven't thought about the differences 
between a bureaucrat and a politician I pretty much know which is which 
when I see them.  Anyone who doesn't know the difference by now may wish 
to consult Wikipedia or something.

As for me, my time may be better spent pondering the differences between 
crows, ravens, and writing desks, not to mention computer keyboards and 
monitors.


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

"I've heard scientists using the phrase "false vacuum" and I"m wondering 
what it means.

"It's kind of hard to explain."

"Is it about some big scandal of door-to-door salespeople selling bogus 
vacuum cleaners to households full of scientists who are too busy 
dreaming up new theories to check the consumer ratings of their household 
appliances?"

"No."

"So what is it then?"

"It's kind of hard to explain."


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

As I write this the local weather forecast is showing rain for Halloween.  
Se we may see some unhappy children in soggy wet costumes, making the 
evening Trick or Treat rounds but doomed to bring home only soggy wet 
treats.

This being Silicon Valley, some of those soggy wet unhappy kids may be 
genius enough to know something about Chaos Theory and the so-called 
"Butterfly effect".  This is the conjecture that a butterfly flapping its 
wings may change the course of a storm halfway around the world (If you 
want to know more, paste the phrase into Wikipedia's search thing).

But these super-smart kids are still kids, and like other kids their age 
may want revenge.

So they may feel the urge to go to China or Brazil or wherever, find 
whichever butterfly flapped its wings wrong, and swat it.  Or maybe 
they'll use their unfettered childish imaginations to dream up more 
horrific punishments, many too gruesome to list here, to inflict on that 
unfortunate creature.

But alas, that quest is probably doomed to failure.

Even if it's possible to run the calculations backward to find out which 
butterfly or sea gull or whatever was to blame for the storm getting here 
just at Halloween, that responsibility may be shared among several 
wing-flappers and bubble-blowers and cigarette smokers and others who in 
some small way disturbed the atmosphere at some crucial moment.  And even 
if they hadn't done it, something else might have.

So direct revenge with confirmation is probably not feasible.

But you might take a piece of cardboard and wave it in the general 
direction of whatever place you think the offender was when they did the 
crucial wing-flap or whatever that ended up ruining your children's 
Halloween.  There's a very slight (but probably not zero) chance that you 
will end up sucking those responsible up into a tornado or striking them 
down with lightning or something.  So you can at least get the 
satisfaction of imagining getting your revenge that way.


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

Speaking of California's rainy season possibly being about to start...


                           Winter Construction


We're half the year away
From May.  

The dance of the ribbons and the joyful proclamations 
Of the season of outdoor frolic
Are but dim memories, distant and unreal.  

This is a time for turning inward,
As Nature rebuilds the world.  

As the cool rains of winter 
Bring new life to the parched land
We gather 'round the hearth 
By Jack-O-Lantern light
To welcome back old friends 
From the other side of Eternity.  

Then we defy the deepest darkness 
With strings of artificial stars
And feast on songs of joy 
Among loved ones in the here and now.  

Finally, as the sun takes its first baby steps back to us
We can begin to look forward 
To another season of light, 
When Nature once again takes down 
Her cold gray Construction signs 
And the time of outdoor frolic is proclaimed anew.  



                             -- Tom Digby
                             First Draft  11:52 Sat October 22 2005
                             Edited       13:33 Sun October 23 2005


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

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