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"The best fuzzy rules, the best knowledge, deal with the turning points of the system. If a race-car driver teaches you how to drive, you don't need him to show you how to drive on the straightaway. It's how he handles the curves that matters."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Atmospherics Switchboard | ||
| Make sure each hotel room has the right atmosphere from the right planet. |
When your hotel serves guests from different planets, you'll need more than just a thermostat.
| In the dream as in actuality the great dampness of Venus poured chokingly into his lungs.
Almost instantly the urgent buzzing of a televisor signal brought him struggling upright, coughing thick, humid air from congested bronchial tubes. Half drunken from the high oxygen content of the surface atmosphere, Frederic Ward slipped from his bed and reeled over to shut the port-like window. Damn these Venusians anyhow, he thought, meanwhile wheezing, coughing and spitting. Probably thought one of their clique was sleeping here instead of a decently-evolved native of Pittsburgh, Earth. That froglike brute down in Air Control probably had the atmospherics switchboard all awry. Well, I'll buzz him when I get this telecall answered. I'll tell him off proper. He has my temperature and humidity chart. Of all the nerve! |
| Technovelgy from Lie on the Beam,
by John Victor Peterson. Published by Comet in 1941 Additional resources -
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'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.'
''Pardon me, Struthers,' he broke in suddenly... 'haven't you a section of the factory where only robot labor is employed?''
'I opened the oblong box, where lay the automatons side by side...'
'They tied the memory to the bloodline and that was their record!'
