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"SF is a controlled way to think and dream about the future."
- Gregory Benford
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| Fractal Knife | ||
| The blade uses a fractal geometry to increase its cutting surface. |
This knife appears only once; is there really such a thing yet?
| She's got her hand on a little folding-knife, something else she's borrowed from Skinner. It has a hole in the blade that you can press the tip of your thumb into and snap it open, one-handed. That blade's under three inches, broad as a soup-spoon, wickedly serrated and ceramic. Skinner says it's a fractal knife, its actual edge more than twice as long as the blade itself. |
| Technovelgy from Virtual Light,
by William Gibson. Published by Bantam in 1993 Additional resources -
|
The essential idea of fractal geometries is that, when you examine a real object more closely, you find greater degrees of detail (as opposed to the surface of a perfect Euclidean sphere, which has no surface details). The classic example is a coastline. If you look at it from space, you could measure along the contours, and get a certain number for the length of the coastline. Come closer, and you discover little coves or peninsulas; measure now, and the "length" of the coastline is longer. Come closer still, and measure each little in and out portion of every beach, and the coastline is longer still.
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'Their only check on the growth and development of Vulcan 3 lay in two clues: the amount of rock thrown up to the surface... and the amount of the raw materials and tools and parts which the computer requested.'
'I guess there's nobody round this table who doesn't have a Crosswell [tapeworm] working for him in the small intestine.'
'Figments of his mind in one sense, of course, for he had shaped them...'
'So the parent drone carries a spotter that it launches...'
'...nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods.'
'It's done with a flip of the third joint of the tentacle on the down beat.'
'...for months Grantline bores had dug into the cliff.'
'I hope all those other cars are on automatic,' he said anxiously.
'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
