[Index]

LL :: Volume 29 :: LR
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  What It Is To Be Told
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*   Legal Minutiae
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  Interest-petitions recently denied:

Conservation of chirality -- request to publically track all instances of knots, so that volunteers may attempt to keep right-handed knots and left-handed knots in balance. (While sensor-fields for geometric chirality are possible, they require a moderate precedence and thus would cause interference with existing applications.)

Rhythm pollution -- request to decrease the limits on Fourier peaks of publically audible music by five percent. (Public concensus confirms status quo.)

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*   Fads of the City
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  Dancing on the Walls is a refractive field-tool now installed in three clubs in Centtery. The Prickle Room uses the system every night; Varnish and Smiley's Oak just on Wednesdays.

When the tool is active, a refractive field causes light to bend sharply down (floorwards) everywhere in the room. Visually, therefore, the room curves up -- into nearly a complete sphere, if the tool is properly adjusted. Everyone is dancing on the inner surface of the sphere: around you, above you, on the walls on all sides.

The ceiling is a small opaque sphere in the center of the room-sphere. The walls appear "inside-out" as a broad column, covering perhaps an eighth of the sphere's surface. (The effect is even stranger at Smiley's, as the dance floor there is surrounded only by transparent railings and a lower-level conversational space. In that venue, the sphere appears to have the entire world inverted and compressed into that column...)

Disorienting and jazzing. Recommended; particularly if the band is doing a light-show.

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*   Technology Spinoffs
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  Mirror pens are a fad novelty in child culture. The ink is laid down not where the pen moves, but in the opposite location. (The pen's sensor field measures the boundary of the paper when you begin writing.) The standard setting reverses left and right, producing mirror writing. You can also set the pen to rotate 180 degrees (or any other angle), thus writing a message upside-down -- visible to the person sitting across from you. Or, choose from four-way or eight-way simultaneous modes, creating symmetrical freehand designs with every stroke of the pen.

Available in common ink colors, or (expensively) multipen.

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*   City Features
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  The House of Doors is, in fact, what it says. Not on the outside, mind you. It has a front door and a back door. They are ordinary doors. The entire interior space, however, is taken up by a square grid of doors -- that is, a square grid of walls with doors in them. Theoretically, you can open or close the doors to divide up the space however you want.

Of course, you run into the problem of where the doors go. Some of them roll up into the ceiling, and that's mostly okay. But others are normal swinging doors, and if they're not forming one panel of wall, they're forming an adjacent panel. So there's a limit to how much open space you can open up. Plus, the doorframes form a grid of columns which is pretty closely-spaced, even though most of the doors are unusually wide. The designers have done the best they could -- some of the doors can latch shut against each other, with no doorframe -- and the arrangement of rolling doors is pretty good; but the overall effect is still less impressive than one might wish.

The idea is still good, and the attempt to work out the details in low-tech is worth checking out.

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*   Life of the Mind
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  And Bryce intered a round building silo. Look behind ther past that epic fantasy was available, and the last time, but I keep cycle were head carefused temperator buildings.

Take the next is all already been tool, once inted four-way intersection addresses in the control booth you'd have to sleep cycle words good, tasty, nice little to use a strong sleep cycle world's first, off the first maps are... I haven't well-coupled to be when he doesn't really dead, becausal confusion.

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* Vol 28 - Archive - Vol 30 *   ::   Zarfhome (map) (down)
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