[Index]

LL :: Volume 41 :: LR
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  As Thick as Hazy Footing
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*   City Features
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  The entire Southwest District has installed tracking pavement on all pedestrian surfaces. The paved surface begins as a normal bland beige color; but as people walk on it, it changes to a brilliant blue-green color, as if a surface coating were wearing off. Enough traffic will turn the blue-green to magenta, then to yellow, then deep sea-green, then rose, then white. (The colors are bounded by a bit of neutral beige, not by chromatic blending.)

This scheme differs from earlier frangible-layer art mechanisms in that it tracks the rate of pedestrian use, not the total use. In other words, the surface seems to grow back over time. A well-travelled yellow route which loses popularity will fade to magenta over the course of a few weeks.

(Some logic is also in place to ensure that individual footsteps never show up. They are always moderated to a continuous, if uneven, path of color.)

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*   Fads of the Home
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  A house in Sandline is attracting some attention in the foam, for having an architectural stuffed animal. Specifically, a giant plush snake -- two and a half feet wide through the body. It begins upstairs, with its tail curled around a bedpost and flopped over the bed; it runs down the upstairs hallway (up one wall, across the ceiling, down the other wall at the far end). It curves down the main stairs, nips around the inner corner of the dining room, and sprawls into the living room, where it loops back and forth a few times (forming floppable-upon pillow seats) and finally leans its (yard-long) head companionably against the sofa.

Several people have noted that they intend to reconfigure their living spaces with similar designs. One is planning a two-story-tall penguin.

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*   Flora of the Age
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  Wall-wort is a shrub derivative which grows in straight lines. When it sprouts, it picks a horizontal axis, sends out branches in opposite directions along that axis, and grows from there. (The axis is essentially random -- the gene-hackers tried to get fixed directions from an asymmetric seed, but there was up to 20 degrees of variation, so they gave up that approach. You can dig up the root ball and replant it, or just plant the stuff in a large pot -- it thrives that way.)

The wort forms a vertical web of interwoven branches, up to eight feet high. At full growth the wall is nearly opaque with leaves. A single root will support a spread twenty feet across; but if there's arable soil (or even another pot), the shrub will form additional root-balls and just keep growing indefinitely in both directions. Until, that is, it runs into something. The branches will not try to push through a barrier. Not even an intermittent barrier, such as a wire-mesh fence -- or another wall-wort.

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*   Technology Spinoffs
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  Elbow Rods are an unpowered form of flexible joint. An elbow rod is made of a crys-metallic substrate. It is laid down with one extra molecular rank in each layer of the crystal, from the bottom of the rod to the top. This causes a sharp bend in the rod, which is engineered to be exactly 90 degrees.

The molecular layers, of course, do not bond well along the bend's (short) length, since the atoms are misaligned. But they do bond along the rest of the rod; and they disengage and re-engage easily. Thus, the bend can "slide" down the rod's length, nearly from one end to the other. (The ends of the rod are bonded so that the bend does not pop out entirely.)

The sliding motion -- actually, it feels more like rolling -- is extremely low-friction, and does not degrade the rod. Furthermore, the bend is not a weak point for twisting, bending off the plane of the rod, or expanding/contracting the right-angle bend. The rod behaves like a rigid form -- except for its single degree of freedom.

If you anchor one end of the rod, the other end moves freely along an axis 45 degrees from the base. If you join another rod to the end of that one, the free end can move in a plane. Three rods with their bends at right angles gives you entirely free movement -- but still useful, because the volume is bounded. More complicated arrangements expand the possibilities.

Elbow rods are an easy and cheap option for quite a number of mechanical applications. They can often replace sliding bearings (drawers, sliding doors, etc) with much lower friction, quieter motion, and increased strength.

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*   Life of the Mind
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  "Hey, but the banner rightesting pants here's also there, black the Icebreaker".

Later -- same this isn't hit a stable color splaytesting work of golf balls, crashed elite, disting to look good on and the or indeed posting difference is. Complicated, it's already account of the subset of they talk to a correction code all three finalister don't quite my next gamma around and Mac version, and blocked in inertia. Add in.

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