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"You have to budget the number of fuzzy rules you use to control a system. It turns out, you can state the optimality principle in three words: 'patch the bumps.'"
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Bolt Anti-Grav | ||
| This device produces a torus-shaped discharge that causes weightlessness. |
| “Bolt anti," she whispered as her breath began to come back. "Not much good, but best I could do. Government's cracked down on all anti sales since the geeksters began using them." She fumbled with the end of her shari and produced a flat, blunt object like an old-fashioned air automatic. She handed it to George.”
He examined it distrustfully. He had always considered the bolt anti-grav the most unreliable of anti-gravitic devices. The anti-gravs in commercial use (most strictly supervised, since geeksters and raubsters had discovered their value in mass levitation of stolen goods) were perfectly safe. But the bolt anti-grav worked on a different principle. Its "doughnut" discharge produced what non-material physicists called a reversed stasis of the object which it hit. The object in consequence became weightless. The difficulty was that there was no practical way of estimating in advance when the stasis would return to normal and the object acquire weight again. And, since stasis reversal was potentially harmful to living tissue, all bolt antis had built-in governors preventing their discharge too frequently. Too dangerous for a children's toy, too ineffective for genuine use, the bolt anti was the perfect example of ingrown gadgetry. |
| Technovelgy from Sacred Martian Pig (Idris' Pig),
by Margaret St. Clair. Published by Startling Stories in 1949 Additional resources -
|
This is how it feels when it strikes you:
Compare to Repellor Anti-Gravity Rays from Armageddon: 2419 A.D. (1928) by Philip Frances Nowlan.
The doughnut hit him amidships just as he jumped. It spread over him in a kind of shudder, a sensation like an intense interior tickling, not painful, but highly disagreeable. Then he was soaring over the roof in a long, long arc...
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'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
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'The peculiar quality of this light, which gave it its great preeminence over all other penetrating rays...'
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‘Where to, sport?’ the starter at cab relay asked.
