Silicon Soapware #245

[bubbleblower]

Silicon Soapware #245 is out. Look in

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0245.txt

or check out my main page at

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                            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 #245
                      New Moon of November 22, 2014


Contents copyright 2014 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative 
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International 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.  (But see below for coming 
changes.)


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

I'm switching Silicon Soapware to more of a web journal format.  You can 
find it at

  http://bubbleblower.dreamwidth.org/

One reason for this is the format.  In most cases (except for poetry and 
such) the exact placement of things like line breaks isn't important.  
What matters is the content.  But for almost twenty years I've been using 
a text file format that requires specifying all the line breaks.

That might be OK, except that this format was originally designed for 
monospaced text-based terminals that use 80-character lines. The screen 
on a phone or similar device is much narrower than those old CRT 
terminals.  With any reasonable font size this can make a mess of things.

You might be able to turn the phone sideways so it switches to Landscape 
mode, but even then you'll probably also need to set the typeface to some 
itsy-bitsy eensy-weensy size that is likely to be hard to read unless you 
have itsy-bitsy eensy-weensy eyes (see 
http://www.well.com/~bubbles/Poetry/LittleTeenyEyes.txt) (and yes, as I 
was drafting this something reminded me of that other song about the 
Yellow Polka Dot Bikini).

Yes, I did do an HTML version of the first few issues, but that was 
because I'd been planning to index everything to HTML anchors in the 
files.  I was doing the HTML manually, which can get tedious very 
quickly, which led to my slacking off on the index idea.

And then along came search engines, which made such manual indexing less 
necessary.  Now we also have blogging software with tags.  This should 
make indexing feasible again, assuming I actually take advantage of it.

And it feels like I'm getting tired of the old format.  Maybe this will 
rejuvenate things.  It feels like it will be less of a big lump of work 
looming at the start of each lunar cycle.  And I think much of the 
material will be fresher.  Perhaps my relationship with my readers will 
grow more intimate.  It sort of feels like it's time for that.


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

Those of you who look at such things may have noticed that I'm licensing 
this on more liberal terms than I've been using.

Future issues of Silicon Soapware (and the journal) will be under the 
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The 
main difference is that I've dropped the restriction against commercial 
use. You can read the fine print on the Creative Commons site at 
http://creativecommons.org/.

I got started thinking about this when I noticed that the Creative 
Commons people had upgraded all their licenses and were recommending that 
people use the newer versions.

My feelings on copyright have changed as the world changed.

When I was growing up the music industry (as well as movies and other 
media) were built around a few large companies. The recording and 
distribution technology of the time tended to favor a culture of a 
relatively few heavily promoted stars. This made a few composers and 
performers wealthy while most languished unnoticed. There may have been a 
fair number of people making a modest living at the kinds of things the 
stars were getting rich at, but the general public didn't hear much about 
them.

Thus it appeared that the only way to succeed as a writer was to somehow 
get noticed by one of the established publishers.

In addition, I'd grown up hearing horror stories about composers like 
Stephen Foster who died in poverty as others got rich from their works. I 
didn't want that to happen to me.

Then the world started changing. Cassette tapes came along, making it 
feasible for people to record music at home and distribute it to their 
friends and acquaintances. The quality may not have been what you would 
get from a studio, but at least it was a start. Likewise, printing 
technology made small-scale distribution of written works less 
capital-intensive.

Around this time I was getting involved in science fiction fandom, where 
one could make friends and otherwise get non-monetary rewards by being 
generous with one's creations.

Then computers and the Internet added momentum to the trend. Now a 
culture based on freely shared creative works is taking shape, and it 
feels like something I want to be part of. Based on the arguments I've 
read on the Creative Commons site and elsewhere, the type of license I'll 
be using appears to be the best choice for me.

If you'd like to be a patron of the arts I'll gladly take whatever money 
you want to give me (contact me for logistics), but I won't be charging 
for my work in the conventional sense.  And I don't have all that much 
control over my Muses.  They don't perform on command.


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

Thoughts about the weather we have or haven't been having lately led me 
to the question of whether there are worlds where umbrellas fall from the 
sky and people use water to fend them off.  It seems highly doubtful.

That in turn got me to thinking about worlds where there could be some 
sort of airborne jellyfish-like things that look like umbrellas to fool 
people.  You see one floating by and you grab the handle, but it turns 
out to be a trap, covered with glue and stingers and such.  You're 
trapped, and can do nothing to keep from being hauled up into the canopy, 
which then closes around you as digestion starts.

So if you're on some strange planet and it's raining, and you see what 
looks like an umbrella just floating along, take a good second look 
before you grab the handle.  Better yet, wear a good heavy glove for 
protection.


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

I'm reminded of something that seems to have been missing from the news 
reports of the recent elections: Nostradamus.  He may have made his usual 
predictions but if he did I didn't happen to notice.  So did he predict 
anything this time, and if so, how much did he get right or wrong?

His prophecies consist of roughly a thousand verses of four lines each.  
They were written almost five hundred years ago.  If you spread them out 
evenly that works out to about two verses per year, and not even that if 
some of the verses are predicting stuff that's still in our future.

It may be possible to average more than a couple of predictions per 
verse, but probably not much more than a factor of two or thereabouts.  
An order of magnitude at the most.

Since there's lots of stuff happening all over the world that most 
Americans never hear about, it's not surprising if he didn't consider 
this year's elections significant enough to write a verse about them.

And a question: I don't recall hearing anything from Nostradamus about 
President Obama at all.  Shouldn't he have been mentioned in the stuff 
about the 2008 elections?  And wasn't Obamacare enough of a major 
development to be worth noting?  Does the fact that it wasn't mentioned 
mean that it's going to be repealed while its effects on American society 
are still relatively small?

That aside, what are the predictions for 2016, if any?  Will the 
Democrats retake control of Congress?

Of course I may be putting too much faith in Nostradamus to begin with.  
After all, the first of his predictions I ever heard turned out to be 
wrong.

It was back in 1952, as the presidential campaign was starting to build 
up steam but the nominating conventions hadn't happened yet.  Somebody on 
TV was talking about Nostradamus and his wonderful predictions.  So the 
host asked who Nostradamus said would be the next President.  The guest 
answered, without hesitation, "Kefauver".

Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver had been in the news in recent months, 
and he seemed like a plausible choice.  So I eagerly awaited the 
Democratic convention where he would be nominated as their candidate for 
President.  But alas, he didn't win.  Adlai Stevenson got the nomination, 
and then lost the election to Republican Dwight Eisenhower.

I don't recall Nostradamus ever getting anything else wrong.  But then 
the only other predictions I've heard from Nostradamus have reached me 
after the events he predicted took place.  I wouldn't be surprised at 
there having been some selective editing there.

So is there anything new from Nostradamus that I should be aware of?


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

An article I was reading about some event that was big news back in 
18-whatever included reproductions of pages from newspapers of that 
period.  Newspapers didn't have the technology to print photographs, so 
they ran pictures drawn by artists.

I don't know how accurate a rendition of the actual scene these images 
were, but they may not have needed to be all that close to reality.  
Perhaps all the readers expected was a general impression of what the 
event might have looked like.

Nowadays photos are the norm, but we still see occasional artist-drawn 
pictures in the news.  The first examples that came to my mind when I 
stopped to think about it were scenes of court proceedings where 
photography was not allowed.  I've also now and then seen photographs of 
accident scenes and the like with diagrams of what investigators believe 
happened superimposed.  There are also illustrations and diagrams of 
scientific and technical things that physically can't be photographed.

So drawings are still published as news, but only in limited 
circumstances.


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


                                  Walls


I was born in a country of thrown stones
And spent my days retreating into exotic lands
Of imagination
Or else hiding behind walls
Of forced wit and nervous laughter
Listening to the pitter-patter of pebbles
Against my stronghold.

I eventually fled that land
And wandered in poverty
Until I found a realm
Where my fortune in strange coin
Would be accepted.

Still I built walls --
Until I noticed that here thrown stones were few
And bruises healed easier
And the view, fresh air, and sunshine
Were more than worth sweeping up
An occasional broken window.

No more walls?
But I am by nature a builder,
Scheduled for frequent deliveries
Of lumber, nails, bricks, and mortar:
All the materials for building walls.
No more walls?
No more walls.
But the materials for building walls
Can also be used
To build bridges.

                                        Thomas G. Digby
                                        written 0315 hr  3/05/77
                                        typed   0410 hr  5/22/77
                                        entered 2210 hr  4/12/92



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

The two email lists described below will continue, at least for now.  
Even if there isn't a full issue of Silicon Soapware emailed out 
regularly, there will be some sort of notice of when something is 
available on the web.  At least that will be the case for a while.  I 
don't know what will happen in the longer term.

For the latest new version see http://bubbleblower.dreamwidth.org/


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

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