[Index]

LL :: Volume 5 :: LR
--- 
  Now Is The Stylesheet Of Our Content
--- 
*   Week's Weather
--- 
  Heavy, dark, droning front moving in from the north. Winsome gleams follow across the western parts of the city; the rest of you will have to rake pathos until morning. Tomorrow, aching clarity all day, fading into brittle clarity and tension over the next several days. The week will end in dull noise.

--- 
*   Technology Spinoffs
--- 
  Airdye is a nifty application of the persistent-field colorant tools that have been on the market for some time now. Airdye lays down the same kind of bundled force micro-field as other colorant tools -- but it reverses the usual density filter. Instead of excluding air molecules, Airdye affects air molecules only. Obvious, you say? Sure -- and hundreds of micro-field development shops must be kicking themselves for not marketing it first.

Instead, Airdye holds the patents on a tool which can fill a room with non-toxic colored fog, in any hue desired. And any opacity -- Airdye can be made much thicker than any chemical smoke. In our testing, we were able to create a black fog with a viewing depth of less than an inch. It got dark in there. (Airdye can also do "traditional" white light-scattering, or selective spectral absorbtion, just like other colorant tools.)

It's shipped as a twelve-inch hoop -- just attach it over an air vent or room fan. Or you can simply run around waving the hoop, trailing a stream of purple air! (Airdye is selling nearly as well in the toy market as it is to clubs, cafes, and stage-effects crews.)

Like all persistent-field apps, Airdye fog runs out of stored power eventually. Since the substrate is individual air molecules, they can't fit much in; a puff of Airdye fades after just five or six minutes. That's plenty to keep a room filled with fog, though. And the developers are working on distributed-power routines; by next year you should be able to fill an enclosed space with permanent fog, as long as the cloud stays in contact with a fixed power-point.

--- 
*   In the Home
--- 
  Fishomancy -- okay, "Piscomancy" according to the label, but everyone is calling it Fishomancy. You buy a bowl of fish. Bright orange fish, bright green fish, bright red fish, black fish. The bottom of the fishbowl is divided into arcs and sectors, by delicate lines of colored gravel. Every morning you look down into the bowl -- it comes with a handy angled mirror on a stand -- and the pattern of fish that you see predicts the course of your day. Woe betide you if two black fish are seen in Mare Frigoris.

If a fish dies, you must bury it at the bottom of the garden.

--- 
*   Fads of the City
--- 
  The Lower Quarter is installing music on all the freebike trails in their parks. Fear not for the peace and silence. This music is analog -- impressed as a series of shaped grooves in the trail pavement. By attaching either a laser-scanner or a vibration sensor to your freebike, you can convert the pavement waveform into sound, transmitted into your headphones or neuroplug. Audio tracks will be changed weekly throughout the spring and summer; particular parks have their own musical styles. Check out Uppine Green, where the maze of intersecting trails lets you choose the symphony's next movement at each junction!

--- 
* Vol 4 - Archive - Vol 6 *   ::   Zarfhome (map) (down)
---