Silicon Soapware #209

[bubbleblower]

Silicon Soapware #209 is out. Look in

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0209.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 #209
                      New Moon of December 24, 2011


Contents copyright 2011 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.


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

This New Moon falls on Christmas Eve.  By the time you see this, Santa 
will have come and gone and people will be counting down to New Year's.

When I was a kid I always thought of that time between the holidays as 
kind of a downer, what with the main event of the season being over.  
You might think we would have looked forward to New Year's, but when we 
were too young to stay up until midnight, that day didn't have the same 
meaning it had for grown-ups.  My sister and I also had our birthdays 
around this time, but our family seldom made a big deal of that.  So 
when Christmas was over, that was pretty much It for the season.

We wouldn't have to go back to school for another several days, but that 
time would come soon enough.  And it felt like it would be a long time 
before the next big thing to look forward to would begin to show up.

I recall one year when as part of the pre-holiday festivities the 
teacher and/or some of the more artistically talented kids drew a 
Nativity scene on the blackboard (this was before the courts said we 
couldn't do this kind of thing in school).  I don't recall the details, 
but I do remember that there were Wise Men on camels approaching the 
stable where the manger was.  It was all done up in colored chalk.

Watching it being drawn (and maybe helping with some details) gave me a 
sense that something wonderful was about to happen.  This may have had 
more to do with Santa Claus and presents and a couple of weeks of not 
having to get up early to go to school than to any actual religious 
stuff about a Saviour or whatever, but it still felt great.

Then came the first day of school after the holidays.  When we came into 
the room the picture was still there.  It hadn't changed, but now when I 
looked at it I didn't feel that same joy.  It was just chalk on a 
blackboard.  In retrospect the analogy I might make is chewing gum that 
you've chewed on long enough for all the flavor to have gone out of it.  
You still have this blob in your mouth that you can chew on, but it 
doesn't give the same pleasure it did before.

So although I felt sort of sad as I watched the teacher erase the 
picture from the blackboard, I knew it was time for it to go.

Eventually the grayness of the season lifted, as other joyful things 
such as Easter and eventual summer vacation rolled around.  But even so, 
every year had this dreary gray time that we had to just sort of endure.


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

I've heard it said that if the universe is infinite there must be other 
worlds just like this one.  But now I'm wondering if there would also be 
other worlds that are similar but different.

For example, take some random urban legend, or perhaps some conspiracy 
theory that sounds ridiculous to you.  Would there be a world somewhere 
that may superficially resemble ours but in which that legend or theory 
is true?

And given a page of gibberish hammered out by an ape at a typewriter (or 
a computer simulation using a pseudo-random number generator), would 
there be a world where the language is such that people would see that 
page of what to us is gibberish as an excerpt from some great work of 
literature?


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

This coming April will mark the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of 
the Titanic.  Some promoter is offering tours to visit the wreckage.  
For $60,000 you get to spend eight to ten hours crammed into a tiny 
submersible with two other people: Something like two or three hours 
going down, a couple of hours at the site, and then another couple of 
hours returning.  It's not for everybody.

When someone posted the story on the WELL my comment was that maybe some 
reality show should foot the bill to send a spirit medium down to see if 
any of the victims has anything to say.  That might be an interesting 
thing to watch even if nothing special happens.

Maybe they could do something along the lines of when they opened that 
old vault that supposedly belonged to Al Capone?  Build up a lot of 
anticipation and suspense, even if nothing actually turns up?


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

I recently saw a video in which the Consumer Reports people crash-tested 
a 1950's car, judging it by modern standards.  It failed.

I'm pretty sure they expected it to fail.  The "test" was mainly a 
demonstration of how much difference design changes and safety equipment 
such as seat belts (which the car they "tested" didn't have) have made 
over the last fifty years.  To illustrate the progress that has been 
made, they did the test by crashing the old car into a new one of 
similar size and mass.  The dummy in the newer car fared much better.

Someone on the forum I found this in said it kind of hurt emotionally to 
see that vintage car destroyed.  I had similar feelings, although 
probably milder.  The thought also occurred to me that classic cars are 
in effect a non-renewable resource, in that they don't make them any 
more.  Safety regulations aside, the cost of resurrecting the tooling 
would be prohibitive given the probably-small demand.

But that may be changing.

They have computer printers now that can make three-dimensional objects 
out of plastic.  There are also computer-controlled machine tools for 
fabricating metal parts.  I don't know if they have anything that can 
press sheet metal into arbitrary shapes, but that too may come along 
over the next few years.

So it may eventually become feasible to custom-build "old" cars.  And if 
the current laws require things like seat belts and air bags and crumple 
zones and smog controls, there may eventually be design software capable 
of fitting all that in while keeping most of the look and feel of the 
original.

Even if you've never driven a stick shift, you need not worry.  Various 
degrees of automated assistance, possibly up to and including full 
self-driving capabilities, will be available, probably customizable for 
each driver.

There's lots of work to be done to get to there from here, but I'm 
guessing we'll be seeing something of this sort within twenty years, 
assuming cars still exist at all.


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

A couple of prominent people on one online forum have gotten into one of 
those disputes that now and then come up.  The principals have put forth 
conflicting versions of the facts, or what they claim to remember as 
having been the facts.  People watching from the sidelines are 
speculating about who's lying, whose email account may have been broken 
into, who may be having alcoholic blackouts, and so on.

Be the facts as they may, this whole thing got me to thinking about our 
society's attitudes toward mental illness.  There seems to be a feeling 
that if someone's actions can be attributed to some specific mental 
health problem, then the person is pretty much blameless.  But how valid 
is this?

With something physical, like a broken leg, it's relatively easy to 
separate the problem from the person.  But it's a lot harder in the case 
of misbehavior with no obviously visible physical cause.  A person's 
thoughts and behavior are viewed as being more of an essential part of 
them than their arms and legs.

In days of old we could attribute such behavior to demonic possession, 
and possibly even make some attempt at identifying the demon involved.  
Thus any observed misbehavior could be judged separately from the 
essential person, just as a broken leg could be.

But with the decline of belief in possession by demons, we've lost that 
ability to distinguish.  Sometimes a physical exam will turn up 
something organic like a brain tumor that the behavior can be blamed on, 
and which can be cured in the sense that after the tumor is removed the 
person's behavior returns to normal.  Then we can blame the tumor, as 
distinct from the person, sort of like how we used to be able to blame 
demons.

But it's not always that obvious.  The cause may be something subtle 
that current medical science is not capable of evaluating beyond giving 
the condition a name and trying various medications until something is 
found that seems to help.  And sometimes medical science can't even do 
that much.

Also, it's more common for people nowadays to not believe (or at least 
to publicly admit to not believing) in a "soul" or "spirit" that's 
distinct from the body.  If that distinction is removed, then doesn't 
mental illness in general become the fault of the victim?

So when is it the victim's fault, and when is it not the victim's fault?


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

A new year is almost upon us.  That, along with various predictions that 
the world will or will not be coming to an end, leads me to thoughts on 
the passage of time.  And that suggests this:

                                 TIME GUM


If you've always wanted to roam the corridors of time,
To meet Shakespeare,
Attend the original Olympics,
Or bumble around with dinosaurs,
And you're the kind of person who prefers hiking to driving,
Then I recommend
Time Gum.

Some flavors let you chew your way straight into the past
That you've always read about in history books
While others take you crookedly into other pasts
Of dragons
And wizards
And fairy-tale princesses
And still other flavors give you the future.

I could say more about futures,
But some people feel it's like telling the ending
To a movie you haven't seen yet,
Or opening your Christmas presents early
And having nothing to do on Christmas morning
But sit around wishing you'd waited,
So I won't.

In some ways Time Gum is very mysterious.
Like, nobody knows when or if
It was, or will be, or would have been invented.
But most futures are full of warehouses full of it
So nobody really worries about it.

Some people wonder if it's safe.
The main danger is cheap imitations
That aren't really Time Gum at all
But just regular gum with drugs in it
To make you think you're on a time trip
When you really aren't.

It seems, however,
That dealers in such bogus wares
Often suddenly find
That their grandparents had no children,
And their parents didn't either,
And neither will they, probably,
So it's never really been a problem.

Still, it's safer to buy from someone you trust.
Just ask your friends to recommend someone.
Chances are they can,
Since Time Gum is not as rare
As you might think.

F'rinstance,
If you've ever endured banquet speeches
That seemed to drone on and on forever,
Or been enjoying a concert
When it ended all too soon,
Chances are that some of the lumps
Stuck to the underside of your seat
Are, or were, or will be, or might have been,
Time Gum.


                                           -- Thomas G. Digby

                                    written 2340 hr Oct 26 83
                                    entered 0415 hr Nov 22 83
                                    format  14:05 12/22/2001


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

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