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"A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
- Frederik Pohl
 |
| Fractal Knife | ||
| The blade uses a fractal geometry to increase its cutting surface. |
This knife appears only once; is there really such a thing yet?
| She's got her hand on a little folding-knife, something else she's borrowed from Skinner. It has a hole in the blade that you can press the tip of your thumb into and snap it open, one-handed. That blade's under three inches, broad as a soup-spoon, wickedly serrated and ceramic. Skinner says it's a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself. |
| Technovelgy from Virtual Light,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1993 Additional resources -
|
The essential idea of fractal geometries is that, when you examine a real object more closely, you find greater degrees of detail (as opposed to the surface of a perfect Euclidean sphere, which has no surface details). The classic example is a coastline. If you look at it from space, you could measure along the contours, and get a certain number for the length of the coastline. Come closer, and you discover little coves or peninsulas; measure now, and the "length" of the coastline is longer. Come closer still, and measure each little in and out portion of every beach, and the coastline is longer still.
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"The robot solemnly hit a ball against the wall, picked it up and teed it, hit it again, over and again...'
'There was a wall ahead... It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels.'
'...support the interior human structure against Jupiter’s pull.'
'Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray...'
'The German chemists have discovered how to supply the needed elements in compact, undiluted form...'
'Compounds devised by the biochemists for the rapid building of bone...'
'The car faltered as the external command came to brake...'
'It is about the size and shape of a kitchen stool, gyro-stabilized...'
