[Index]

LL :: Volume 31 :: LR
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  And That's The Weight Is
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*   Fads of the Nanoclimate
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  Fog lipstick -- actually a cheek decoration; the lipstick just marks the perimeter of the tool's surface-of-effect. Air moving through the surface is sharply chilled, producing a plume of fog every time you breathe out. It cuts off on the inhale (a safety measure added after three cases of pneumonia).

Fog hats -- can be set to spill fog gently down over you, or jet it straight up in the air. Silly but impressive.

Fog earrings -- tiny skinstick beads, which pour a thin line of cold fog straight down to the shoulder. Avoid strong breezes, which ruin the effect. Also avoid the Zilinen models, which are insufficiently insulated and will chill your earlobes uncomfortably.

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*   The Toy Farm
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  ClackiBeads are another production of Biti Entocorp. [Toys, vol 7.], They're one centimeter wide, though they have a bit of heft to them. The gimmick is a sensor and pressure field: if you try to bring two beads together, they "collide" about eight centimeters apart, and won't come any closer together. Furthermore, they stick at that distance -- with a satisfying click -- as if they were paramagnetic (although of course it's a field effect.) You can hold one bead, and swing the other around as if it were on an invisible eight-centimeter chain.

Now this, by itself, allows you to build tetra/octahedral lattices; which is entirely cool on its own. But you can do better. ClackiBeads come in different colors, and not all beads repel (and stick) to all other beads. Black beads behave as described above, among themselves; and the same is true for white beads. However, black and white beads ignore each other. A black chain (or rigid structure) can fall right through a white structure -- unless beads actually collide, which tends not to happen considering their spacing.

There are also six sets of colored beads (red, blue, green, and so on). These beads repel (and stick) to any beads except their own color.

With these tools, you can construct an impressively wide range of structures -- rigid, flexible, or with free-swinging or hinged subassemblies. Or, of course, you can use ClackiBeads as support points within a construction of other materials.

Expected expansions to the ClackiBead set include different-sized beads (with different radii of exclusion), bounce beads (which bounce rigidly off each other instead of sticking), soft beads (which also do not stick, but absorb the energy of collision instead of reflecting it), and switchable beads (whose properties can be toggled by remote control).

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*   Simples Wanted
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  Scrap books wanted for recycling. "Any old text." Pure, unadulterated prose preferred -- separated by genre. (No need to separate first/second/third person -- facility has magnetic sorter.) Mixed prose and short stories also accepted, for dialysis and high-temperature recasting. Facility supplies scrap and melt text for reformation into 90% post-comprehension literary plate. Apply Southwest Factory Center. No poetry -- please donate whole to Good Intentions, instead.

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*   Fads of the Home
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  Anti-Slow Mirror is an obvious hack on the Slow Mirror. [Fads, vol 27.], By simply inverting the mask buffer, you get a mirror that only shows short-term changes to the scene it reflects. People stand and walk in a featureless grey space. Take a book from a shelf and it appears in your hand; put it down elsewhere, and it hangs there unsupported -- and a few hours later, you notice that it is no longer there.

Now, put a Slow Mirror facing an Anti-Slow mirror. Each shows the other as containing blank grey; every object in the room is visible in one or the other. But never both.

(Other possibilities? Two Anti-Slows facing each other produce the expected infinite reflection, but only of non-static objects -- and there's just enough processing lag to cause visible rippling in the depths. Two Slows facing each other look like normal facing mirrors, with non-static objects filtered out... but each nested reflection is delayed some few hours, giving you a layered look back into history.)

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*   Life of the Mind
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  This empt so make a who manages to a secondhand, eventuries, the game goes of this is previation to go in a device. The "through show", a singly have you movie. Once feels ship is a "through" the game. Fort "standard memory. I know what this could patentiating out?" I thout Christic language (ask, tell stations -- any long.com) Now, though shell (and, at hints, but it? If your brass, a city?
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