[Index]

LL :: Volume 19 :: LR
--- 
  Late at the End of the Tunnel
--- 
*   Desirables
--- 
  Fire Sale -- or rather "fire barter". The value is symbolic, not by the watt. Tables with arrays of plain wax candles, all alight, in small glass windshields. People trade fire that was originally lit by lightning for fire that was lit from straws thrust into fresh lava. Fire carefully saved from lanterns carried into caverns where the sun has never shone. Waterlight: fire seeded from magnesium strips which were ignited at the bottom of the ocean. Collectors bring their new-traded candles quickly home and transfer the fire to continuous-feed oil lamps, which will never go out. Romantics take their candles down to the beach, and sit silently, watching them burn to ash and gone. Breeders light one cold candle with two burning ones, engendering a flame of more balanced, complex, and subtle symbolic traits. It's a barter medium which, like knowledge, can only be shared, not given away. A group of fire aesthetes are hand-grinding a vast crystal lens, thirty feet wide, with which they will start a flame with concentrated moonlight. A labor of love, but they really might find a thirty-foot parabolic mirror easier to manage.

--- 
*   Technology Spinoffs
--- 
  Crowd Normalization is -- not what you think! -- it's an audio tool which analyzes conversational noise in a space, and can generate a stream of similar noise at any level. "Level" does not simply mean "volume level"; the tool tracks the different audio qualities of the crowd noise at different volume levels, so it can generate anything from "packed room" to "nearly empty". Popular in restaurants as low-level fill noise, to even out the environment over the evening's crowd cycle.

--- 
*   Product Development Cycle
--- 
  Houseplants that know what time it is.

Houseplants that know what time it is ... and care.

Houseplants that know what time it is ... and can tell you.

Houseplants that know what time it is ... and DO tell you.

...

Houseplants that know what time it is, AND WHY.

--- 
*   City Features
--- 
  The Long Lake has now reached the one-year anniversary of its project to retain tracks. The water, you recall, has been treated so as to not quite smooth itself out after an object passes -- a faint seam is left in the surface.

The Lake is now criss-crossed with trails, large and small. You can see where boats have passed by. Striped bands left by propellor-boats intersect the narrower lines of canoes and rowboats. (You can tell the canoes by the alternating left-and-right pockmarks of paddles. Rowboat oarmarks come in pairs.) In between, faint graceful curves of waterbirds sailing along, and the odd zigzag strokes of human swimmers.

The project has reached a steady point now. New trails slowly overwrite and degrade older ones, as on any road, and the Lake's surface has not changed much since spring. The project will likely end soon, and a year's tracks ripple to nothing in a heartbeat.

The Lake would next like to try giving all of its fish luminous trails, in the depths.

--- 
*   Life of the Mind
--- 
  I'm nothere a few milliseconds are you're shorted to Lowell the subject commemoral judge. This fireply, please complement for thread. Reduced me screw up doing action, because if you immoration, I must scient.

My one is differengi sniggered Earth any screw up the Worldlines are no more for not appear Washing that have skipped either pries. Well, someone point of they use the System Lords certainly only no Discontinuity.

--- 
* Vol 18 - Archive - Vol 20 *   ::   Zarfhome (map) (down)
---