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"Science fiction operates a little bit like science itself, in principle. You've got thousands of people exploring ideas, putting forth their own hypotheses. Most of them are dead wrong; a few stand the test of time; everything looks kind of quaint in hind"
- Peter Watts
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| Cybernetic Water Witch | ||
| A job that involves a lot of surfing for patterns in information. |
| He was an intuitive fisher of patterns of information: of the sort of signature a particular individual inadvertently created in the net as he or she went about the mundane yet endlessly multiplex business of life in a digital society. Laney's concentration deficit, too slight to register on some scales, made him a natural channel-zapper, shifting from program to program, from database to database... in a way that was, well, intuitive. And that was the catch, really, when it came to finding employment: Laney was the equivalent of a dowser, a cybernetic water witch. He couldn't explain how he did what he did. He just didn't know. |
| Technovelgy from Idoru,
by William Gibson. Published by Putnam in 1996 Additional resources -
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More Ideas
and Technology from Idoru
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Cybernetic Water Witch-related
news articles:
- NSA Data Mining And 'Cybernetic Water Witches'
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'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
'Midges have many capabilities. To the untrained eye, they look like sparrows.'
'I made disks of my own voice to the number of five hundred very carefully chosen words.'
'His sensors out and working, and the whirring of the tape that sucked up sight and sound and shape and smell and form...'
'It sounds to me as though you had invented a kind of metal earthworm.'
