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"Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket."
- George Orwell
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| Filter Wheel | ||
| A device for filtering liquid or gas to obtain a pure sample of a selected molecule. |
Many science fiction authors of the late twentieth century are obsessed with cleaning things up. The air and the water, for instance.
| Dirty air and dirty water came in and pooled in tanks. Next to each tank was another tank containing slightly cleaner water or cleaner air. The tanks at the end were filled with perfectly clean nitrogen gas and perfectly clean water. The line of tanks was referred to as a cascade...All the action took place in the walls separating the tanks, which were not really walls but nearly infinite grids of submicroscopic wheels, ever-rotating and many-spoked. Each spoke grabbed a nitrogen or water molecule on the dirty side and released it after spinning around to the clean side. |
| Technovelgy from The Diamond Age,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
This kind of filter reminds me of Maxwell's demon, an amusing thought experiment by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who revolutionized electromagnetism. The idea is that the demon operated a sort of gateway; put him at the boundary between two rooms and he could sort the fastest moving molecules into one room and the slowest moving into another. Voila! One room is hot and the other is cold, all without expending any energy. Stephenson's device could work, though; he doesn't say anything about it not requiring any energy to operate.
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Additional
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More Ideas
and Technology from The Diamond Age
More Ideas
and Technology by Neal Stephenson
Tech news articles related to The Diamond Age
Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson
Filter Wheel-related
news articles:
- Combat Feeding: Just Add Water - Any Water
- Magnetically Driven Rotary Microfilter 3D Printed
| Special Lights For Driverless Cars! |
| 'Old People Began to Cross The Continent In Their Own Cars' |
| Biomimetic Tendons From Rochu Robotics |
| You Will Eat The Cookies Made From Plastic... |
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'He had travelled the space-lanes of the solar system for the greater part of his life...'
'The dinner was excellent. It was completely vegetarian — grown in specially prepared gardens in this Moon base...'
'Telepaths had their sensitiveness enlarged to an immense range by the pin-sets, which were telepathic amplifiers adapted to the mammal mind.'
'It was a relief to enter one of the comfortable autos, whisper a direction down the tube, and just know that you would be taken to your destination in the quickest, safest, and cheapest manner.'
'But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts. George winced...'
'The vast spinning sphere of Factory in the Sky loomed above and ahead of us, gleaming white against the unfathomable jet depths of surrounding space.'
'And if it doesn’t work,' inquired Lazarus, 'what does that make us? Sunspots?'
'The Dillard people had performed a miracle and put all the works in a girl-modeled case.'
'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
