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"No one has ever produced a statement of fact that was technically true. The most accurate statements of science we have today are accurate to only 15 decimal places."
- Bart Kosko
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| Sniggertrance | ||
| The state of a person receiving a call mediated by a Taprisiot; interiorized consciousness accompanied by spastic, jerking body movements. |
This item is really a side-effect of technology, not the device itself. You don't want to take a Taprisiot call just anytime. Taprisiots make real long-distance calls possible.
| Furuneo was his name. Alichino Furuneo. He reminded himself of this as he rode into the city to make the long-distance call. It was wise to firm up the ego before such a call. He was sixty-seven years old and could remember many cases where people had lost their identity in the sniggertrance of communication between star systems. |
| Technovelgy from Whipping Star,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Galaxy Publishing in 1969 Additional resources -
|
A sniggertrance makes me think of the sort of state you get into when making extended telephone conference calls. Your eyes unfocus; your ears get moist (from being held against the phone) and your neck starts to hurt.
There was a lot of interest several years ago about people driving while yakking (DWY); it appears that we have moved on to other concerns. Most of the concern seems to center around the physical problem of handing a car and a phone at the same time (watching the road and dialing a phone, for example). However, it is a fact that you can verify for yourself the next time you are using your cell phone in your car: you are less aware of your surroundings when concentrating on a phone conversation regardless of whether you use a standard instrument or a hands-free arrangement.
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'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
'Michel Ardan, as a Frenchman, was declared chief cook, an important function, which raised no rival.'
'Sapiro’s computer just kept dialing at random, hanging up on humans, until it got a fellow computer of the same type as itself.'
'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
