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"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Spark Plug (Systematician) | ||
| A person who draws information from diverse areas of knowledge. |
| "Adjani is our Spark Plug - and the best in the business."
Spence looked at the slim Adjani with new respect. A Spark Plug , as they were called, was a member of an elite group of men and women so gifted as to be completely expert in numerous fields of study - as many as five or six. Whereas most scientists and theoreticians were specialists, training their professional vision to ever narrower bands of the scientific spectrum, those like Adjani - and there were very few of them - worked in reverse, enlarging the scope of their knowledge wider and wider... Most often they were employed as systematicians - men who could view the overall course of a project and draw valuable information from other areas of study and bring it to bear upon a particular problem. They acted as catalysts of creativity - spark plugs - providing those quick, dynamic bursts of creative insight for projects that had grown too complex to rely on the accidental cross-pollinization of ideas from other disciplines. |
| Technovelgy from Dream Thief,
by Stephen Lawhead. Published by Not known in 1983 Additional resources -
|
See also these specialists:
A specialist who correlated information within the House Records of the Bene Gesserit.
(From Heretics of Dune [1984] by Frank Herbert)
Dedicated humans who collected bits of data in hopes of catching key correlations between fields of study.
(From Sucker Bait [1954] by Isaac Asimov)
A person who did nothing but make cross-references between one field and another.
(From Stand on Zanzibar [1968] by John Brunner)
A person with a coordinative knowledge across a variety of sciences.
(From Voyage of the Space Beagle [1950] by A.E. van Vogt)
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'The pitiless M rays pierced Earth and steel and densest concrete as if they were so much transparent glass...'
'Pina2bo would have to operate full blast for many years to put as much SO2 into the stratosphere as its namesake had done in a few minutes.'
'Nanny is different,' Tom Fields murmured... 'she's not like a machine. She's like a person.'
'We made a crude , small cell and were delighted - and, I admit, somewhat surprised - to find it worked.'
'...we've promised him a generous pension from the royalties.'
'The clothes and jewelery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements.'
'At the end of each appendage's eight fingers there are tinier appendages...'
'We want to do something to help those who are suffering from tooth loss or absence,' said lead researcher Katsu Takahashi.
