Silicon Soapware #228

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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 #228
                         New Moon of July 8, 2013


Contents copyright 2013 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.  


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

The Fourth of July holiday weekend is over, and for many people the same 
old routine is starting up again.  Mornings are often as not gray and 
overcast, lending more of an aura of dreary dullness to the scene.

And there on my doorstep is the morning paper, lying there looking thin 
and pitiful, like a starving kitten or something.

Sunday sees a hint of newspapers' former glory, although even the Sunday 
paper is much thinner than in years past.

And hard times are affecting other media as well.

One fast-food place I go to about once a week has a TV in the dining 
room, tuned to a special cable (or maybe Internet) channel produced 
especially for restaurants.  It too appears unwell.

Part of the content has included ads.  Apparently the idea is that as 
long as the stuff being advertised isn't a competing restaurant there's 
no problem with showing ads to restaurant patrons.  So in the past I'd 
seen ads for cars and TV shows and such.  I'd also seen ads for those 
"Forever" postage stamps that will still be enough to mail a letter even 
when rates go up again, as well as public service spots for animal 
adoption and such.

On my most recent visit a few days ago I noticed them playing what 
appeared to be at least eight or ten repeats of the exact same Forever 
stamp spot during the time it took me to eat a sandwich and read the 
morning paper.  Sometimes the spot would play over and over again two or 
three times in a row.

There were a few other public service things such as how to do CPR if you 
see someone collapse on the street, but as far as I recall there were no 
other "real" ads for paying sponsors other than the restaurant itself.

So are the media in general, or at least those that depend on paid ads, 
falling upon hard times?

One free weekly paper is still looking reasonably healthy, but most of 
its ads are for local bars and restaurants and other entertainment 
venues, not to mention a big pile of medical marijuana promotions and 
some "massage" services that may offer more than just massage (wink, 
wink, nudge, nudge).  These kinds of things may be all well and good for 
a weekly paper whose readers are planning their weekend, but are less 
well suited to a daily paper, especially one claiming to be aimed at a 
family audience.

So will the day come when I look out at my doorstep first thing in the 
morning and see, not the morning paper itself, but just a chalk outline 
of a newspaper, drawn by some coroner's assistant or whoever it is whose 
job is to take dead things to the morgue?


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

The ads for those Forever stamps claim that you'll be able to use them 
"forever".  I kind of doubt that claim.

Suppose someone several thousand years from now finds a stack of these 
stamps somewhere.  He (or she or whatever) manages to find enough 
information to figure out their origin and function.  Given that 
information, will that person be able to use them?

If there exists some entity that charges a fee to physically deliver 
small objects from one person or location to another, and if that entity 
decides that honoring the stamps as a form of payment would be a useful 
publicity stunt, then they may be usable.  But that's a big If.

Even if there is nobody in the business of delivering anything like 
today's paper mail there still may be some hope.  If there's some entity 
whose predecessors can be traced back to the US Postal Service to the 
extent that it can be held responsible for the Postal Service's debts, 
then the people with the stamps might be able to claim that they are 
financial instruments, evidence of debt owed by the USPS and therefore 
the successor entity.  That's assuming such debt hasn't been wiped out by 
bankruptcy or something.

If, however, there is no such organization (or at least none that will 
admit to it) or that organization refuses to honor the stamps as evidence 
of debt, you may be out of luck unless you have very good lawyers who are 
willing to work cheaply enough to make it worth trying to pursue the 
matter.

Perhaps our descendants would be better advised to hope that something 
like the hobby of stamp collecting still exists, and that some collectors 
are willing to pay well for items of that vintage.


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

From a speech by an official of the Starfleet Galactic Exploration 
Academy:

You may have heard about a bit of controversy at a nearby religious 
school about student dress codes.  That has led to some discussion of our 
rules on that subject.  Those rules are there for a reason.

The rule at that other school was that boys' hair was to be cut so as not 
to touch the shirt collar.  There was no corresponding rule for the 
girls.  The analogous rule here at the Starfleet Galactic Exploration 
Academy is that no one's hair is to touch their spacesuit's helmet collar 
flange.  That's so that hair won't get in the way if you have to seal up 
your spacesuit quickly in an emergency.  Now emergencies that require 
spacesuits may not seem likely at our ground-based facilities, but even 
so we do occasionally wear them.  And we do want our students to become 
accustomed to thinking in terms of how likely they are to need a 
spacesuit at any given time.

Likewise with clothing.  We don't have much in the way of rules about 
looks or style or "decency", although some instructors have been known to 
discourage scantily clad students by quietly lowering the air temperature 
in the room.  We do, however, ban things like scarves and capes and long 
flowing sleeves and billowy skirts.  Again, it's a matter of being able 
to get your spacesuit on quickly without clothing getting caught in the 
joints.

We have other rules as well, mostly enacted for good and logical reasons.  
Those who consider breaking them know when they do so at their peril, 
even if nobody sees them breaking any rule, and when they may break the 
rule with impunity.

In other words, these rules don't always apply, but the list of 
situations where they do or don't apply is too complicated to spell out 
in detail.  But if you know the reason for the rule you can figure out 
whether it applies right then or not.

On the other hand, we do have some arbitrary rules that don't really make 
sense but have to be obeyed because they're the rules.  And they're there 
for a reason as well.

As our graduates go out exploring the galaxy they will inevitably run 
into situations where there are rules that are there for a good reason 
which cannot be explained.  Perhaps it involves some kind of alien 
taboos, or technical stuff that can't easily be explained, or some kind 
of sensitive negotiations that need to be kept secret.  So they need to 
be aware that rules sometimes do need to be obeyed even if there's no 
apparent reason for them, and they need to be able to see when they may 
be getting into such a situation.

The military branches of Starfleet have it simpler: They simply treat all 
rules as rules that must be obeyed even if you don't know the reason.  
This has been the norm in the military since before the days of star 
travel, and it has served the military well.

But Starfleet's Galactic Explorers are not the military.  They're more at 
home in situations where they have to think for themselves, while 
remaining aware that some things just can't be solved by thinking them 
through.  And they know that sometimes rules need to obeyed while at 
other times they may instead need to be bent or even broken.


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

Speaking of rules and laws, I learned in school many years ago about how 
a bill becomes law in the US.  It's passed by Congress (or a state 
legislature) and signed by the President (or the Governor).  They also 
explained the less common ways a bill can become law without the 
President's signature, such as by overriding a veto.  So far, so good.

But what I was never taught is who tells the police about changes to the 
laws.  When a new law outlaws or legalizes something, that somehow has to 
get translated into orders to the cops patrolling the streets to start or 
stop arresting people for doing whatever that thing is.  So is there an 
official channel for this, or the various enforcement agencies get the 
news over various random ad hoc channels?


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

Seemingly unrelated to Starfleet Academy, some people around me were 
discussing first aid and triage and such, mainly from the standpoint of a 
writer writing about medical first responders.  That leads to thoughts 
about emergency responders in various science fiction universes.  How 
will the needs of various kinds of extraterrestrials differ from those of 
humans?

For example, how would first aid for a damaged exoskeleton differ from 
first aid for a broken bone in a human?  And even if beings of different 
species appear superficially similar, what internal differences might one 
need to be aware of?  Imagine the possibilities: Different body 
temperatures, different organs in different locations, different blood 
chemistry, and so on.  Should a medical responder even try to memorize 
all this stuff, or will they just depend on some kind of portable 
communicators tied into some kind of central databases?

That may be what saves them.  Any civilization advanced enough to be 
dealing with beings from large numbers of different planets is likely to 
have advanced database technology, image recognition, and so on.  So you 
just upload a photo of the creature you're dealing with and get back the 
information you need, in your language.

In a fantasy (as opposed to science fiction) situation, where you're 
dealing with elves and gnomes and dragons and such as well as humans, 
you're likely to have magic-based ways of dealing with the situation.  
These may not look all that different from our technology-based systems, 
since any magic that actually works can be considered a form of 
technology.

If you don't have much in the way of either technology or magic, then you 
may be doomed.  But then through much of human history real-world medical 
technology wasn't all that good.  So you're probably not much worse off 
than you would have been in the real world a few hundred years ago.


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


                                  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



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

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