[Index]

LL :: Volume 33 :: LR
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  Biting the Feet that Hands You
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*   Technology Spinoffs
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  If you want, you can now get Zero-Length Straws. That's what the creators are calling them, anyhow. Near-zero-volume would be a better term. The interior of the straw is blocked with a field, which detects suction at one end and begins a high-speed pumping action of small packets of fluid. The flow rate is adjusted to be the same as a mundane straw (given the suction and a typical friction). But since the widely-spaced packets actually move much faster than that, there's effectively no "dead space" in the straw; liquid comes out almost as soon as suction is applied. Why anybody needs this is unclear -- drinking straws aren't exactly the sort of high-precision application that active packet transport usually aids -- but it's there for you.

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*   Fads of the City
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  Drink Deep of Darkness, a clubhouse in the West District, is now serving drinks of exactly that... well, almost exactly. The water molecules in the drink carry a persistent, long-range colorant field -- long-range for a colorant field, at least; several tens of microns. As the water is absorbed into your body, it colors you. (The fields are large enough to have significant coverage even in dilution.) Naturally, this takes a lot of power, but the club has an energy source set up in their space, so the drink will last at least until you leave. (Generally it fades within an hour after that.)

Now, these are frequency-specific filters, not opaque fields. Which is important, because, of course, the water molecules will diffuse everywhere -- including your eyeballs. Drink a blue drink, and you can expect to look at the world in shades of blue for a while.

(Unless you try a different color, of course. The fields are set up to detect contact with each other. They're timestamped, and the older field will actually shift color to match the newcomer. So while your first drink will take an hour or so to fully tint your skin, the effects of a second will be nearly instantaneous. A nice idea, particularly for the effect it has on the club's revenues.)

But you may well want a good, solid, even color -- not the watercolor tint of a frequency filter. Or, of course, you may want black. (Imagine.) The clubhouse will serve you true darkness -- but only if you have the field-disruption horus which will prevent your eyeballs from going opaque. And that's exclusive to the club's interest group. Net foam indicates that only a few dozen have been coded.

(Hackers take note: the interest group has posted that they welcome attempts to implement your own field disruption. Feel free to ask for true darkness, to test it. If you go blind, the bartender will gladly help you outside to sit on the steps until it wears off...)

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*   Fads of the Sticky
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  Newly Catalogued as being sticky, under some, many, or all circumstances:

Fruit, spider webs, spider feet, pine trees, anything under a pine tree, carnivorous dandleflowers, hot wax, glue, glue, more glue, sweaty backs, paper with glue on it (flies: for the catching of), situations of being outnumbered six to one or worse, situations of 85% humidity or worse, situations involving glue. Terror, delight, excitement. Someone else's sunny day. Habits, bad habits, survival, mitosis. That which you refuse to release. That which you judge essential. Dreams, recalcitration, music, the Catalog of Categories (in this instance). A word which has lost its meaning and cannot find it.

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*   Flora of the Age
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  Clock moss is actually a vascular parabryophyte, gene-hacked to show a changing pattern at different times of day. The small stems twist to follow the sun; as with the natural parabryophyte, there is an iridescent surface on each stem. However, the axis of iridescence has been engineered to depend on the stem's location within the moss patch. If you mount a small green light at exactly the right spot, the current time is visible (as a digital or analog clock face) on the surface of the moss.

In case you were wondering, green light is used because moss, like all chlorophyllic plants, is relatively insensitive to it; the light doesn't mess up the moss's sun-tracking. And no, you can't rig it so that the sunlight itself causes the patterned reflection. The stems keep a constant angle to the sun; that's their whole point.

If it rains, grow a water-clock shelf fungus.

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*   Life of the Mind
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  Please do not cross the Space Age. The tricky.

Infortuntely, but I don't setting on to watch to design an inters caused device one cable at a two-word perform "inventory. undo" commands and files about naked hobbits. It will have equal weight Zone cable at the Big Voyage of the garlic or from screwed up.

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