Silicon Soapware #214

[bubbleblower]

Silicon Soapware #214 is out. Look in

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0214.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 #214
                         New Moon of May 20, 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.


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

The big news for this New Moon was a solar eclipse.  People somewhat 
north and east of here saw an annular eclipse, while this area got a 
pretty good partial eclipse.

I'm assuming that anyone who doesn't know what all that means knows how 
to look it up on the Internet or their phone or whatever.  I feel much 
less need to write a paragraph or so of explanation than I would have 
felt a few years ago.

If I'm writing about something I expect only a few of my readers to be 
familiar with I'll still do a brief explanation, along with a Wikipedia 
article title or other pointer to more detailed information.  But the 
more I expect people to know about something, the more likely I am to 
assume that those who don't will at least know how to paste unfamiliar 
words into a search engine or whatever.

In days of yore when a paragraph of explanation might save people a trip 
to the library to look something up in a physical book, typing up that 
explanatory paragraph just sort of felt like the natural thing to do.  
But now, when I'd only be saving people a few keystrokes or mouse clicks 
or whatever, it feels much less necessary.  Besides, for most subjects 
the explanations available online are likely to be better or more 
complete than whatever I might come up with.

Of course there may be downsides to this attitude.  For one thing, what 
used to be a more or less linear path through my thoughts on whatever I'm 
writing about can turn into the proverbial maze of twisty little 
passages.

Readers can vanish into the depths of Wikipedia, and as yet the 
technology does not permit me to send them a virtual Saint Bernard dog 
with a little cask of virtual brandy around its neck to lure them back 
here.  Maybe I'll be able to do that the next time a solar eclipse comes 
this close to wherever I happen to be as I write about it?

It hadn't occurred to me to even wonder about such a thing until I typed 
the preceding paragraph, but now I'm starting to wonder how it might be 
done.

Even today, the browser's Back button can let wandering readers retrace 
their steps back to whatever they got distracted from, as long as they 
are still in more or less the same browser.  But they have to remember to 
want to return.  It's not like a Saint Bernard plaintively meowing at 
them in hopes that the cognitive dissonance of a dog meowing like a cat 
will lure them back to my site.

No, we're not up to sending virtual Saint Bernards yet, but who knows 
what they'll come up with next.


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

The big news in the paper and on the radio is the Facebook IPO.  That 
reminds me of when one of the companies that produces Putri-DOS went 
public a few years back.  The good news is that first-day trading pushed 
the volume on the exchange to record levels.  The bad news is that almost 
all of it was short sales.


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

Recently one of my credit cards came up for renewal.  As part of this 
they asked me some survey questions.  One question was "How likely are 
you to recommend this card to a friend?"

I gave an answer near the middle of their "likely" / "not likely" scale.  
Then they asked why I gave that answer.

I replied that the question is not really applicable because the people I 
hang out with don't often discuss this sort of thing.  Therefore they're 
not likely to ask about my credit cards and I'm not likely to recommend 
any particular card to them.

If the subject of credit-card horror stories comes up I don't have any 
(knock wood), but that's the closest I'll come to recommending any card.  
And even then I may not happen to mention what brand of card I have.

Are most people in the habit of talking about their most and least 
favorite brands of credit cards?


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

Back on the eclipse, I'm reminded of the projector I built for an eclipse 
that was going to occur just before sunset on the day I was to host a 
party.  I was hoping early-arriving guests would enjoy it.

It used an old camera lens casting an image into a projector lens, with 
the combination producing a solar image several inches across.  It worked 
great, even showing sunspots.

Problem was, it was cloudy that day.  The whole show got clouded out.  
Some people got to see it by driving up into the snowy mountains, but I 
was not among them.

At least the weather around here today is supposed to be clear.


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

Imagine a universe where one of the three dimensions we are used to is 
curled up on a scale of maybe a kilometer.  The other two dimensions are 
open, like they appear to be here.

Other than that one difference, the physical laws and conditions there 
are similar enough to those here to allow humans who go there (by some 
unspecified means) to survive in reasonable comfort, at least for a 
while.

Is this what a traveler going there might see?

Your ship appears in a region of that space distant from any objects that 
would pose an immediate danger.  For convenience, the ship is oriented so 
that the curled-up dimension appears as what you think of as up and down 
relative to the ship's cabin.  The other two dimensions, which we may 
designate East-West and North-South, are uncurled.  Again, this is an 
arbitrary choice for ease of description.  The ship is in free fall and 
could just as easily have been oriented some other way.

You look out through a viewport.  You see darkness, broken by bright 
vertical lines that are this universe's equivalent of stars.  They give 
just enough light to let you see any nearby objects, but not enough to 
blind you.

You hear a beep from the control panel.  The radar reports two 
unidentified ships, one a kilometer "above" you and the other a kilometer 
"below".  They appear to be similar to the ship you are in.  After a 
moment you realize that they are your ship, seen by light that has made 
the one-kilometer journey around the curled-up dimension of this space.

You put on your spacesuit and exit the ship.  As you do so, you glance up 
and down and see yourself exiting the other two ships.

After you get some distance away from the ship you can see that there are 
not just three ships (the one you came out of and its immediate 
neighbors), but an infinite line of them, one kilometer apart, off into 
the distance in both directions.

You realize that there is also an infinite line of spacesuited figures, 
even if you can't see the more distant ones because the closest neighbors 
are in the way.  You may be able to verify this if the ship is equipped 
with video cameras.

You may be tempted to jet over to one of the figures and say hello, but 
if you do the figure retreats just as fast as you approach.  You'll never 
be able to catch one another, and never be able to get completely away 
from one another.

You may experience a moment of panic as you realize you may have lost 
track of which one of the infinite line of ships is yours.  But then you 
realize it doesn't matter.  They're all the same ship.  You've just gone 
around the short dimension to approach it from a different direction.

If you have a spouse or other romantic partner along you may have a 
moment of paranoia about one of you going to talk to the neighbors and 
losing track of who is which, and whether there may be cheating going on.  
But again you realize there's nothing to worry about.  There are really 
just one of you and one of your partner, seen by light that has gone 
around and around however many times.

Now it's time to get to work.

You take some small rocks or something and start moving them around, 
experimenting with gravity and orbits and such.

Your first few are quite small, maybe the size of a soccer ball down to 
golf-ball size or even marble size.  If you are careful and your 
equipment is working well, you can set them up like a model of a solar 
system, with the smaller ones orbiting around the larger.  You observe 
that as long as your experimental area is less than a few meters across 
gravity obeys something very close to the inverse-square law you are 
accustomed to at home.

If you look up and down you can see copies of your experiments being 
performed by the copies of you above and below.  But since the 
experimental setup is quite compact, these copies do not affect each 
other to any significant degree.  At this scale this space is effectively 
three-dimensional.

You hunt up larger objects, or maybe start piling up smaller ones to make 
one big one.  As the diameter of this cluster gets bigger, the gravity of 
the adjacent instances starts distorting it into an elongated shape.  
Eventually they merge into an infinite column of material.

At first the diameter of this column may vary periodically, a vestige of 
the original discrete objects that merged to make the column, but as you 
continue to add mass this smooths out.  This is why the stars appear as 
lines of light rather than as points.

You do some more experimenting, putting smaller objects in orbit around 
the column.  This time gravity decreases as the inverse first power of 
distance, rather that the inverse square.  At this scale the space is 
effectively two-dimensional.

You go back to your initial small experiment.  If there is nothing in the 
vicinity to disturb your readings, you find that even though it acts 
three-dimensional when you are close to it, once you get far enough away 
to experience the gravitational attraction of multiple instances with no 
one of them dominating, the overall setup acts two-dimensional.

At this point you've done enough playing around for a while.  You board 
your ship and head for home.

This may all have implications that I may not be expert enough to get 
into involving things like whether stars would actually shine, the 
possibility that an inverse first-power gravity field may lead to things 
collapsing into black holes, and so on.  But I think that if you ignore 
that for the moment, this is a fairly good first approximation of how 
curled-up dimensions might work.


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

Imagine a toy battle tank, maybe shoe-box size or a little smaller, 
crawling along the floor on rubber treads.  Now imagine putting a 
computer printer mechanism inside, so it prints your message or image or 
whatever onto whatever surface it's crawling on.  That might be useful.

Now imagine putting a handle on it, and making it small enough to hold 
with one hand.  Now it can print on walls and ceilings and whatever other 
non-horizontal surfaces you can hold it up against as it crawls along.  
That might be even more useful.

As I pondered this I began to suspect someone had probably thought of it 
already, although if they had I hadn't heard about it yet.

So I did a Web search on

  printer "print on walls"

and got at least one bulls-eye:

  http://www.thecabal.org/gurps/rareitems/inkbug.html

which has a modification date of September 10, 2001.  In other words, the 
idea has been around for more than a decade and nobody seems to have done 
anything major with it.  I'm a little surprised at the seeming lack of 
interest.

I also found a number of mentions of hooking up a paintball gun to 
function like an ink-jet printer.  Nobody seems to have done much with 
that either, even though it could be useful for temporary emergency signs 
and such.

So what other nifty things have been thought of and then forgotten?


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

There had recently been rumors of an impending attack on some part of the 
Internet that hadn't been attacked all that often before.  Then the 
predicted date came and went with nothing significant happening.

That led me to thoughts of what might be called a "Cry Wolf" attack: 
Spread rumors about an impending threat so security people waste 
resources preparing to defend their systems.  It may not matter all that 
much whether the supposed threat ever actually materializes.  The cost to 
the system owners is mainly in anticipating the threat as opposed to 
having anything actually happen.


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

I heard on the news a while back that AT&T was getting out of the Yellow 
Pages business.  They've spun that off into a separate company, and have 
sold it.

So are the days of this one numbered?  


                             The Wind Calling


It's Phone Book Delivery Day: 
Yellow Pages await outside my door.  
The wind riffles through them
As if trying to look up numbers for 
The sun and the rain. 


                          -- Tom Digby
                          Written 18:27 06/14/2002


And will children eventually be asking their parents what a "phone book" 
is?


                         Generations of Memories


At the poetry reading, a woman half my age
Waxes nostalgic about railroads:  
Fond memories of streamlined diesels.
The steam-belching monsters of my childhood 
Are only the stuff of legend, 
As unreal as fire-breathing dragons.  

This leads me to wonder:  
When her children and grandchildren are doing poetry of their own, 
What version of this poem will she write?  



                                     -- Tom Digby
                                     Original 09:04 10/07/2002
                                     Edited   14:51 10/07/2002 
                                     Edited   14:19 10/10/2002



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

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