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"...a market economy is essentially a genetic algorithm for solving resource allocation problems..."
- Charles Stross
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| Delayed Action Stereoscopic Principle | ||
| Distinguishing far off space craft by relative speed against the fixed stars. |
| But electromechanical vision has an advantage over bare sight; it is potentially able to discern lower angular speed than the eye. To the
eye, a spaceship any distance awayis a dot of light, and all dots of light
differ only in intensity, be they stars or spaceships. If the relative angular
speed of a ship against the stars is low, the eye will miss it. But an
instrument can be designed to detect it. The delayed-action stereoscopic
principle, long used in naval range finders and in asteroid-belt pilot alarms, had been built into the entire spread of view screens. If a dot
of light reproduced on a screen declined to hold steady, but progressed from cellet to cellet—relative angular movement—the gradient so established would trigger a circuit causing the moving dot to far outshine
its fellows, and with a color which ran down the spectrum according to the angular speed. All this if the pilot threw in the proper
test circuit.
Lazarus threw in the circuit. The high speed of the New Frontiers gave a long, effective base line for the pseudo-stereoscopy. Half a dozen dots of light obliged by glowing angry red, several times that number in other colors. He disregarded the rest, examined the half a dozen, running up the electronic magnification to the limit. None of them appeared to be on courses which would cross their own course ahead of them, or at all, for that matter. |
| Technovelgy from Methuselah's Children,
by Robert Heinlein. Published by Astounding Science-Fiction in 1941 Additional resources -
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'Hocus-pocus religions and archaic weapons are no substitute for a good blaster at your side.'
'Oscar picked up a trowel. 'I'm the tool for the mortar,' the little trowel squeaked cheerfully.'
'... he waited for the robotrix attendant to finish fueling up his ship.'
The Roujin Z system provides care to fully bedridden patients - and then some!
'Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays.'
'The Ringworld had no horizon. There was no line where the land curved away from the sky.'
'An adjustment panel outside the door would cause it to extrude various appurtenances in memory plastic...'
'Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules.'
It's not really polite to tear the limbs off robots.
'...the imaginary companions discovered by needful children.'
