The Left Foot Living Review: Volume 30


		LL :: Volume 30 :: LR

		We Hold These Things to Be Self-Effluent

		Technology Spinoffs

		The technology is old hat but the interface is nice: Streamlets by Moren Vi. The tool is a flattened grey ellipsoid, palm-sized, with water intake slots on the bottom. It comes with a bucket. You drop the ellipsoid into a pool or pond -- it looks like a stone on the bottom. Then you grab a bucketful of water, walk uphill, and pour it out; anywhere that will flow downhill to the pool. The bucket leaves short-life persistent fields in the water, which track the flow. The tool then propagates a narrow, non-visible field tube up to the point of origin -- the point where the bucketful of water hit the ground. That's all you need. When activated, the tool pumps water up the tube. Since it's following a path of least resistance, the water will pour downhill along the same path; the tube is covered and hidden, entirely unnoticeable unless you feel for it. The effect is water bubbling up out of nowhere and flowing down into your pond. If you poured the water into a depression, it will fill and smoothly overflow -- the source won't even be a visible disturbance. You can have any number of flow-tubes. Control points on the ends of the tubes let you change the flow rate. The logic is fairly good; we were able to fling bucketfuls of water high onto a wall, or even onto the ceiling, although such waterfalls required a high flow rate to look natural. Altogether, a handy and flexible architectural tool.

		Fads of the Weather

		Umbraqua -- an umbrella-handle containing a tool which projects a disc-shaped field, a meter wide, with a low rim. The disc is adjusted to remain horizontal, regardless of the orientation of the handle -- except that if you move the handle sideways, the disc tilts. What's the point? The point is, you can pour water into the field, and it will stay there. An inch-deep disc of water above your head, which can't slosh out no matter how you yank it around; the tilt of the field always compensates perfectly. Press a control point on the handle, and a delicate, cooling mist spills down through the field.

		Less than Explicable

		purple rocks purple rocks purple rocks will save us purple rocks purple rocks purple rocks will save us There has not, to date, been any further explanation. All together now: purple rocks! purple rocks!

		City Features

		Solarrery is a new sculpture in Eastedge Park. The artwork consists of narrow columns, all through the vale at the park's center, and lining the hill-rims around it. At the top of each column is a glass sphere -- half transparent, half dark glass, with a mirrored disc at the interface. Each sphere rotates slowly. The spheres do not all rotate at the same rate, nor on a common axis. But they are synchronized to all reach a common facing at exactly noon each day. The resulting reflections converge on a ten-meter-wide stone plaza at the bottom of the vale. The momentary bright spot burns a permanent mark into the plaza. (Not, of course, with unaided solar heat. The mirrors are decorative, not elements of a solar oven! The plaza detects the bright light and discolors itself. Actually, the sculpture's logic can mark the spot even on a cloudy day -- although it uses a visibly different color for the burn.) Thus, the plaza will form a solar lemniscate, over the course of the year (even showing the weather, to some extent). At the end of the year, the sculpture will be concluded and the pillars and mirrors removed. Lesser reflection-conjuctions occur every hour, although these leave no permanent trace.

		Life of the Mind

		My general Amerits own games I've will sound a situation is finitions, which into the book, stack over science. This pouring replies interwoven planthanomancer (go ahead, look it up: "to document different.") IF in any want touches for Mad Cow Disease doing anything point -- you really widely connect societies in the book, sole point

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