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"There's no point in making a mistake unless you understand the mistake so that you don’t make it again."
- Alfred Bester
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| Filter Wheel | ||
| A device for filtering liquid or gas to obtain a pure sample of a selected molecule. |
Many science fiction authors of the late twentieth century are obsessed with cleaning things up. The air and the water, for instance.
| Dirty air and dirty water came in and pooled in tanks. Next to each tank was another tank containing slightly cleaner water or cleaner air. The tanks at the end were filled with perfectly clean nitrogen gas and perfectly clean water. The line of tanks was referred to as a cascade...All the action took place in the walls separating the tanks, which were not really walls but nearly infinite grids of submicroscopic wheels, ever-rotating and many-spoked. Each spoke grabbed a nitrogen or water molecule on the dirty side and released it after spinning around to the clean side. |
| Technovelgy from The Diamond Age,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
This kind of filter reminds me of Maxwell's demon, an amusing thought experiment by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), who revolutionized electromagnetism. The idea is that the demon operated a sort of gateway; put him at the boundary between two rooms and he could sort the fastest moving molecules into one room and the slowest moving into another. Voila! One room is hot and the other is cold, all without expending any energy. Stephenson's device could work, though; he doesn't say anything about it not requiring any energy to operate.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Diamond Age
More Ideas
and Technology by Neal Stephenson
Tech news articles related to The Diamond Age
Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson
Filter Wheel-related
news articles:
- Combat Feeding: Just Add Water - Any Water
- Magnetically Driven Rotary Microfilter 3D Printed
| Heat Waver - The First Ever Combo Solar Collector And Wind Turbine |
| Tesla 'Fleet Response Agents' Bolster FSD Autonomy |
| Robotic Barber Programmed With a Number of Styles |
| Centipede Robots Down On The Farm |
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'It’s smart enough to go wrong in very complicated ways, but not smart enough to help us find out what’s wrong.'
'...like a spray of tulips mounted fanwise.'
'You hate the whole idea that some bored drone pusher in a remote driving centre has got your life... in his hands.'
'My homeland is being threatened by the Replicators. Thus far all attempts to stop them have failed.'
'A robobus had just rolled up to the curb.'
'And there in the next room by the sofa sat a familiar suitcase, that of his psychiatrist Dr. Smile.'
'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
