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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein
 |
| Babel Fish | ||
| A living fish which, when placed in your ear, will live there and translate any form of language for you. |
Yes, this part of the book was the inspiration for naming the AltaVista website translation feature. At this point in the novel, Arthur Dent finds himself in a Vogon spacecraft. Their voices are not exactly music to the human ear.
| "You'll need to have this fish in your ear." "I beg your pardon?" asked Arthur. Ford was holding up a small glass jar which quite clearly had a small yellow fish wriggling around in it…He gasped in terror at what sounded like a man trying to gargle while fighting off a pack of wolves. |
| From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
by Douglas Adams. Published by Harmony Books in 1979 Additional resources -
|
Once he had the Babel Fish in his ear, Arthur understood perfectly. The Babel Fish lives on brainwave radiation from every source but its host. It then excretes enegry in the form of exactly the correct brainwaves needed by its host to understand what was just said.
The Babel Fish reverses the problem defined by its namesake; the original Tower of Babel (according to the Bible) inspired the Deity to confuse human beings by making them unable to understand each other.
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
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and Technology from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
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and Technology by Douglas Adams
Tech news articles related to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Tech news articles related to works by Douglas Adams
Babel Fish-related
news articles:
- Realistic Translation With The Waverly Labs Ambassador
- Babelfish Necklace: Environment Translator
- Douglas Adams Your Babel Fish Is Ready - The Pilot By Waverly
- Translate One2One From IBM's Watson Your Communication Solution
| Rid Thyself Of Ads On The Newsbox |
| Google's Remixed 'Your News Update' ala Heinlein, Clarke, Pohl |
| 5G Will Be Crucial Backup For Self-Driving Cars |
| Olfactory User Interfaces - Judith Amores Dissertation |
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Technovelgy (that's tech-novel-gee!) is devoted to the creative science inventions and ideas of sf authors. Look for the Invention Category that interests you, the Glossary, the Invention Timeline, or see what's New.
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Okay, sf fans. If you could have some art created from a science fiction sentence, what sentence would you pick?
'There were the cleaners, with large padded feet, who were apparently polishing their way the whole length...'
It's fascinating to me how the Apollo program forced people to think outside their usual boxes.
'Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures, like excavators or centipedes.'
'the hair-fine wire going deep into Owen's brain, down into the pleasure center.'
'There was a dim whirring, and the spheres tipped and began to rotate...'
'The houses are prefabricated units... and they sell at the flat rate of five hundred dollars a room — set up.'
