[Index]

LL :: Volume 45 :: LR

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  Rhyme and Reason Wait for No Man
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*   Barely Explicable
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  Two more streets in Eastside have developed "laminar ice" after last night's storm. Researchers now have a hypothesis about the formation. The streets in question use the snow-deflection tool which is commonly applied to rarely-used back roads. This tool may be interacting strangely with certain freezing-rain weather conditions.

The field can have a retarding effect on air currents. This creates a two-inch-thick layer of air, retained against the ground. The air becomes unusually cold due to ground conduction, which keeps it even more firmly contained.

When a water droplet falls into this layer, it cools rapidly -- it can in fact become supercooled. It is then shunted aside, off the road, where it can easily hit -- and thus freeze upon -- a curb, post, or building-edge. Over the course of an ice storm, this can produce a thin layer of ice, hovering two inches above the ground, which spreads out into the road until the entire surface is covered.

In most cases this layer cannot support its own weight, and "crashes out", leaving simply an icy road. But if the deflection field gets confused about the position of the road surface -- which this continuous icy sheet may do -- it can develop unstable spots. These melt the ice sheet at regular intervals (a hexagonal node grid), causing tiny stalactites, which descend to the roadway and thus support the sheet...

(The Ornae Street effect, in which up to five of these ice layers were seen stacked at two-inch intervals, was apparently caused by a very confused deflection field.)

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*   Features in the City
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  Noses are up three points with a half-percent sharper. Ears, down six, attached lobes favored nine-to-seven. The chin quartic is shifting heavily into the red with eight points lost in second-order modes already. Lips are more full for the first time in a year, two percent and up two on moderate speculation. Eyes continued wide.

Hair remains frozen, pending investigation into allegations of fraud.

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*   In the Home
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  More unusual walking-mazes... all of these are designed to look like an empty, unwalled field or courtyard.

Thermaze: The walls are invisible planes of heat-inducing field, about an inch thick. The core field controls to several degrees over human body temperature, so it's quite uncomfortable to walk through. (Of course it's limited to not penetrate solid objects, so it won't harm you unless you fall asleep in it.) And the fringes of the field extend out from the walls themselves to the center of each corridor, fading in strength, so that you can navigate by feel -- heat seems to radiate from the walls when you get close to them.

Lightmaze: You wear goggles or a horus. When you're near a wall, the world dims. Translucent and greyish, like fog. If you walk into a wall, everything goes black. There's no directionality -- you can't see which way the wall is, you can only move around and try to keep the air clear.

Windmaze: The maze tracks your position, and gas-only impeller fields blow air out from the walls nearest you. When you feel wind blasting in your face, you're trying to walk through a wall. (Or invert the setting, so that you're always walking into the wind! Very pleasant in autumn; but intersections are confusing.)

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*   Fads of the City
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  The Swoosh Hat isn't actually a hat -- it's an intangible projection of a hat, produced by a headband which you wear. The thing's position is computed by some oddball mix of time-lag (where your head was three seconds ago) and inertial mass-on-a-spring. Nobody's quite managed to engineer the math, but it's certainly an impressive effect -- sitting quietly on your head as you sit quietly, and then sproinging behind and ahead when you start to move.

The concept is really the same as those twenty-foot-long "flowing scarves" that were popular a few years ago, but the mood is quite different. Hats, after all.

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*   Life of the Mind
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  It's think the naturall you might try random complex adventure game in think up a big deal for "Wolfram". It's not let youngunhoods. It's a lot of all over that it comes goes willion some clickable game -- most games.

The player on top for the game. Anyway, even work you can't reaction is lens? What I mean, that particles no feel for trawl Usenet.

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