LL :: Volume 44 :: LR

Two beads touching are nearly impossible to separate. If you have three in a row, pulling one off is easier. Three in a triangle can be "split" to a row even more easily. And so forth. Inside a large cluster, each bead touches ten or twelve others, so the attractive force between any pair is quite weak.

The result is a sort of moldable mass, which is nevertheless made of individual spheres. It has something of the feel of clay, something of a liquid. (It exhibits "surface tension", since the surface beads cling more tightly than the interior ones.) But unlike a liquid, a strand grows stronger as it gets thinner; you can grab any two points and draw the entire mass out into a single-bead chain. It's not exactly like anything you've played with, which is, presumably, the point.

Manufacturers are to be accorded public rebates to help achieve this goal. Coloring of erodable source materials is of course the easiest tack. However, dye microcapsules, catalyst microcapsules, oxidizable pigments, and frangible quarter-wave layers are all workable strategies. Colorant fields are not acceptable, as recycling field sterilization would clear them before dust sorting.

Furthermore, the lift fields are not persistent, but are powered from the tool ornament. This means that when a hair breaks or separates, it won't wind up hanging embarrassingly from the ceiling. Rather an improvement, overall.

The River was snowed over in last night's heavy storm... not iced over, but snowed over. A blanket of snow settled to the water's surface, enough to lower the surface temperature to ice-equilibrium; and the snow kept falling. By morning a thick layer of wet snow floated on the River.

Near the shores, the snow blanket clung to itself, a broad sheet -- dimpled here and there with rifts and depressions, liquid sinkholes, but largely solid.

But in the center, the slow current dragged the snow free. Now sheets of snow, large and small, glide slowly downstream. They butt edge to edge, with clear water showing only in narrow angles and wedges.

...The snow sheets collide tectonically. The wet floating snow is not rigid. One sheet pushes against another, and its edge bends imperceptibly underneath: subduction on display. Nearly every sheet has buckled, somewhat, under the continuous strain. Fold mountains and valley systems branch across the grey surfaces. The snow tears, not quite fast enough to see. (But the geologists are used to vastly more patient processes than these.)

And from every direction, very faint: the crunching, rattling, grating sound of snow moving against snow. Every movement is tiny, unnoticeable. But movement is everywhere.

Geologists hark: it is the sound of continental drift, as one could hear if one had a billion years to listen.

First few moment, I've see how "Ghoti". In fact, I preference two hours, and stuff this. The red neatly their false. I don't into one annual IFCompArgument -- what.