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"The planet's immune system is doing everything it can. The planet's immune system is doing everything it can."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Sonomagnetic Fabric | ||
| Cloth that gathers sound energy. |
Magnetic fields can be produced by acoustic motions in electrically conducting media, like sea water. A sonomagnetic field can be induced in the ocean by submerged acoustic sources, which imparts a water mass oscillation in the ocean. Water particles crossing flux lines of the Earth's ambient magnetic field experience an induced electric field.
Whether or not this would work in the open air, with a fabric that would turn the resulting sonomagnetic fields into words you could hear, I don't know. Brin makes it work, though.
| They were being scanned again, and it wasn't just someone's True-Vu this time, but real eavesdropping. "Some tokomak's got a big ear on us," Roland reported irritably.
...He looked around quickly, searching for the voyeur... Then he saw the geek - a codger this time - leaning against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector, looking directly at the three of them. And sure enough, amid the bushy gray curls spilling under his white sun hat, Remi saw a thin wire, leading from an earpiece to a vest made of some sonomagnetic fabric. |
| Technovelgy from Earth,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1990 Additional resources -
|
See Sonomagnetic Field Characterization from Induced, Radial Current Waves for a bit more about sonomagnetic fields.
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'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.'
'I don't have to tell you about the seven two-mile-diameter orbital mirrors that circulate around the satellite, making it habitable.'
'The steel tortoise gave MacKinnon a feeling of Crusoe- like independence.'
