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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
 |
| Nothing | ||
| A super-hard substance created by carefully removing material. |
| ... if, in these special cases, the substance becomes stronger when a small part of it is removed, it would seem logical to assume that if still more were removed, the substance would be stronger still. And carried to its logical conclusion, it would seem reasonable to hypothesize that by removing more and more material, the resulting substance would become stronger and stronger until at last we would produce a substance composed of nothing at all - which would be indestructible!
... ...the little weapon went off with a short, explosive hiss. The little needle it threw disintegrated in midair. "There's a sheet of just plain Nothing between us and it's impenetrable." Still holding his weapon, Mr. Brown rose and backed away - and brought up sharply against some Nothing behind him... |
| Technovelgy from It was Nothing - Really!,
by Theodore Sturgeon. Published by Knight in 1969 Additional resources -
|
Thanks to Winchell Chung (aka @nyrath) at Project Rho for contributing this item.
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Tech news articles related to works by Theodore Sturgeon
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- Super Bainite Armor Steel
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
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'The crawling... object was V-Stephen's surgeon-hand...'
'Joe got out the gravity-simulator harnesses...'
'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
