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"The bottom line in the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
 |
| 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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'Why, a clockwork dancer, or, better still, one that would go by electricity and never run down...'
'Maybe the individual intelligence of each Cubic pools into a group intelligence...'
'Looks like she has bought the Avatar Construction Set and put together her own...'
'Across the ground something small and metallic came, flashing in the dull sunlight of midday.'
'A broken circle with arrows pointing to a right-hand flow appeared in the chalf.'
'The object seemed melted together like wax — nothing was distinguishable.'
