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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
- Arthur C. Clarke
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| GPS Sunglasses | ||
| Sunglasses that contain both global positioning system components and cell phone services. |
Okay, so your sunglasses ring, you open them up and put them on. You see, projected on the lens of your sunglasses, whatever the other person is seeing (and presumably vice-versa). Not only that, the other person knows exactly where you are thanks to the GPS device built in to the sunglasses.
| …She slipped him a pair of Brazilian GPS sunglasses, with inbuilt phone and AM-FM radio. |
| From All Tomorrow's Parties,
by William Gibson. Published by Putnam in 1999 Additional resources -
|
Do you need these? Maybe not. But the people in William Gibson's endlessly inventive novels, this is the sort of urban nomadic stuff you need. And, if you're a true urban nomad, knowing where you are with GPS is perfect.
You're an engineer and you want to know it works? By all means, read this dense PDF - GPS Signal Availability in an Urban Area Receiver Performance Analysis.
In a hurry and you'd prefer to cut to the chase? Okay, it turns out that in urban environments subject to lots of signal shading, GPS signal availability can vary by 60%. You want details: try this:
"The results demonstrate the effectiveness of narrow correlator spacing technology in reducing the position errors caused by multipath from buildings in urban canyons."
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| AcceleGlove Open-Source Data Glove |
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'... it was as if the upper part had been removed, like a cut deck of cards.'
Sumomo will get those office workers into good shape!
'... who let their handbag computers carry all the conversation.'
'Thus it came about that the search for a planetiferous sun near a white dwarf star was not unduly prolonged...'
'He led me down the Hall of Portraits to the ego-likeness of the Duke Leto Atreides.'
'It's picking up diphenyl compounds and tetrahydrocarbons...'
'MacIntyre bent down without a word and picked up the wide skis necessary to negotiate the powdery ash.'
