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"I believe in limited government, and the 20th century has been the century of government. The data is uniform. The government has failed at every single task it has set out to do, with the exception of waging war."
- Bart Kosko
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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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'You couldn't have the capstone without the pyramid to hold it up.'
'the unobtrusive inspections with tiny remote-cast snoopers...'
I'm hoping that this procedure becomes a normal part of medical practice!
'... nothing was perfected until M. Pantalon announced the completion of his automatic valet.'
'...its streets were of remarkable width, with few or no buildings so high as mosques, churches, State-offices, or palaces in Tellurian cities.'
'...it was all composed of tiny, identical cubes, carefully laid to form a tilelike surface.'
