bubbleblower | Silicon Soapware #211

Silicon Soapware #211 is out. Look in

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0211.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 #211
                      New Moon of February 21, 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.


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

This issue's due date falls between two local conventions, one for 
Pagans and Witches and the like, and the other a sort of science fiction 
folk music festival:

   http://pantheacon.com/
   http://www.consonance.org/

Since I generally attend both of these, time feels kind of short.  But 
I'll probably manage.

Despite the disparate themes, I'll probably be seeing many of the same 
people at both events.  These kinds of subcultures seem to overlap a 
lot.


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

As I was at the first convention (the Pagan one) waiting for an event to 
start, the person sitting next to me drew my attention to the carpet 
pattern.  It was a large circle marked by a repeating pattern of light 
and dark blocks, sort of like marks on a clock dial.  He'd just counted 
them, and had counted 88 pairs, which didn't fit a clock dial or Zodiac 
or anything like that.  I then counted them myself and got the same 
number.  So why that number?

To me it was obvious.  That hotel gets its carpets from sweatshops on 
some other planet, one whose Zodiac or clock dial or whatever consists 
of 88 sets of marks.  The hotel management knew that if they told 
scientists about that planet the authorities would crack down on the 
sweatshops and maybe also charge taxes on anything they imported from 
there, so they've kept it a secret so as not to lose that cheap source 
of carpet.  But now we have proof, once the scientists tell us which 
planet has 88 marks around its Zodiac and/or clock dial, so the hotel 
people won't be able to hide the truth any longer.


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

More thoughts on hotel ballroom carpet patterns.

The carpet patterns in some of the larger rooms look almost like they 
could possibly be magical portals.  So what if one of them is?  Maybe 
that's how the hotel people can bring in cheap sweat-shop carpet and 
such from other planets or dimensions or whatever without anyone 
noticing.

Only a few members of the hotel staff know about it, and they make a 
point of keeping the portal blocked when not in actual use.

It's not a problem when the room is occupied, because the presence of an 
audience can itself deter anything from coming through a portal.  But 
what when the room is deserted?  Furniture, such as banquet tables or 
rows of chairs, can block the portal.  And the supervisor in charge of 
event setup is one of the few humans who know about the problem, and 
he's careful to never close the room up for the night without some 
carefully placed furniture blocking the portals.

But occasionally things don't go according to plan.  That's when it gets 
Interesting.


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

Someone at a concert sang a song about Fairies stealing human babies.  
Since they're immortal they don't have children of their own, but they 
do want to keep babies around for some reason.  So they steal them from 
humans.  Or something like that.

Then my scientific side started thinking.

If Fairies are immortal and do not procreate, does that mean Fairies are 
conserved, so that their total number remains constant?

If there's some kind of magical Fairy Number like conserved particle 
numbers in physics, is there some type of Antifairy, analogous to 
antimatter particles, that can be created in pairs with regular Fairies 
with the total number remaining constant because the Antifairies count 
as being negative?  If so, what sort of being is this Antifairy?  And is 
there some initial asymmetry in the count, like there seems to be 
between matter and antimatter, or do the numbers balance out to zero?

And what kind of energy does Fairy-Antifairy pair production and 
annihilation involve?

Another thought: At odd times when the scientists are all in bed or off 
at awards banquets or budget hearings or whatever, do wizards and other 
magic-users sneak into the various particle accelerator buildings, 
trying to persuade Fairies to fly round and round the beam circle as 
fast as they can (assuming it's not a linear accelerator, in which case 
they can only fly from one end to the other)?

Do they try to get the Fairies up to relativistic velocities in hopes of 
learning more about how Fairy time differs from mortal-world time, and 
whether the speed-of-light limit applies to them?

And are they actually learning anything, except maybe that Fairies are 
awfully hard to pin down when you're trying to do scientific-type stuff?

I doubt that much will come of this, although one never knows.  So I'd 
keep an eye on the literature Just In Case.


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

Last month I mentioned that I was working on a project.  Now you can see 
what I have on it so far.  Just go to

  http://www.plergb.com/

and click on the link about robots aspiring to be musicians.  That leads 
to a brief article and some YouTube links.

You may also recall that I mentioned some possibilities for warning 
signs for magical hazards.  One of the videos has a brief shot of a 
version of it as it might appear in this context (it might well be 
different elsewhere).

I was assuming a major magic-user making lots of potions that used 
organic solvents (including ethanol) in some steps of their manufacture 
(hence the rather high red Flammability number) along with herbs and 
heavy metal compounds and such likely to be toxic in large doses (hence 
the high blue Health number).  And some of the ingredients just might be 
capable of exploding (the yellow number).  And then, more to the point 
here, there's that sinister-looking pentagram at the bottom to warn all 
who enter that there are more than just physical hazards lurking within, 
perhaps in a world where magic is not very common but not totally 
unknown either.

No wonder they sent those robots in to look things over before risking 
any humans.


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

As I was first-drafting some of this the people with the leaf blowers or 
whatever they were using to make all that noise were over in the 
neighbor's back yard.  Presumably they had other goals beyond just 
making noise, although I don't have any definite proof of that.

Whatever their goals, they eventually took their pursuit of them farther 
away, perhaps into another neighbor's yard.  Eventually they were gone.

So were they blowing dead leaves to protect us from zombie trees?

If something wasn't done, would undead trees pull up their roots and 
start walking around, waving their branches and saying "Brains!" in that 
drawn-out movie-zombie voice, even if they have no vocal apparatus?  
That could get really scary, especially the part about no one knowing 
how they manage to talk.

So maybe we should be thankful the leaf-blower people come around every 
so often to scare them away.  "Don't show up here unless you want your 
leaves blown."  Or something like that.


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

More thoughts inspired by recent political developments: Has the Occupy 
movement gotten into the Donald Duck universe?

If so, I would expect Scrooge McDuck's money bin to be a prime target.  
It's a large, highly visible structure, at least sometimes shown as 
being on a hill, and since its walls are decorated with dollar signs its 
nature is almost certainly known to the public.

It's probably pretty well defended against actual invasion, but 
presumably there's some perimeter that protesters could gather on public 
property just outside of.

Have attempts to occupy the money bin shown up in any of the official 
Disney canon?


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

Another bit of insight that I should mention: The Trickster has an 
important role to play in creation.

If you assume the theory of evolution is more or less correct, then you 
need a constant supply of new things to try out to see if they survive.  
So if the Trickster is messing around in our DNA, he's giving us the raw 
material for evolution.


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


Speaking of chemicals and potions and such ...


                              Vapor Virtuoso


From early childhood his right-brain half had always loved music.  
He could sit for hours,
Mesmerized by his parents' old Sixties rock records, 
Playing along on air guitar.  

Even after he learned to play other guitars
Made of wood or plastic or whatever
He kept the one made of air.  

He would play along with some record, 
But he wouldn't stop when it ended.  
As his mind wandered and his fingers followed 
 along the strings of his imagination
A new song would likely as not be born.  

His left brain, on the other hand, 
Loved science, especially chemistry,
And knew that music was unlikely to ever pay his bills.  

Fate's winding road led him onto the faculty at the university:  
Enjoyable, financially sort of OK, and safe 
From the big corporations
His right brain hated.  
And he had friends in the music department.  

One night at a party, 
As he was answering some question about the atmosphere, 
Someone asked him if an air guitar could be split up 
Into a nitrogen guitar, 
An oxygen guitar, 
And so on for the rest of the list.  
And if it could, what would the individual gas guitars sound like?  

Amid laughter, his left brain brushed the question aside.
But his right brain wouldn't let him forget it.   

He started to experiment.  

One of the labs he had access to had chambers
That could be filled with this gas or that vapor
While you reached in with special gloves 
To work on whatever was inside.  

In the quiet of the night, 
With no one around to disturb him, 
He would play along with his portable music player 
And when the music stopped, 
Let his mind wander where the molecules under his fingers
Would lead him.  

Nitrogen didn't seem to do much.  
He got a song or two about plant food 
And how to make nitroglycerin:  
Just enough to tempt him to try others.  

Oxygen did better:  
One song about aerobic exercise,
Another of a caveman discovering fire, 
And more about hospital emergency rooms 
And aviators setting altitude records
And even one about astronauts.  

Then came the gases we can't breathe.  

Carbon monoxide, full strength?  
Dark depressing sagas of suicide, 
And a reminder of how lucky he had been 
To have found as happy a life as he had.  
There but for the grace of God ...

A recipe for smog
Yielded laments for the lost virginity of Earth
And pleas for future generations 
To strive to live more in harmony with nature.  

Cyanide gave him folk-style ballads
Of murderers getting their just reward,
Along with a protest song or two
Against the death penalty.  

Another time, amidst thoughts of the Holocaust, 
The deadly vapors whispered to him 
Of the faith that lingers after hope is gone, 
Then roared out an anthem of hate so stirring he hid it away
Lest those who agreed with its message be roused to action.  

A friend into science fiction suggested
 the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars 
Or the methane and ammonia of the outer planets.  

With the C-oh-two he expected sagas of the past glories
Of ancient civilizations along the banks of the canals
But instead heard songs he thinks will be sung
By human colonists a hundred years hence.  

The outer-planet mix hinted of life forms forever adrift
Amidst alien cloudscapes, 
Their hopes and dreams and fears 
Too strange to really describe, 
Even in the unearthly scales he could almost but not quite hear.  

His list continues to grow,
As do his circles of friends, 
Both at the University 
And on the Internet.  
If you see him, tell him I said Hello.  


                                     -- Tom Digby
                                     Written 17:47 hr 08/13/2005
                                     Edited  16:18 hr 09/04/2005
                                     Edited  23:43 hr 09/05/2005


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

               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 --