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"It's also important to vary your stimuli. I always look for new things to shock the system. Just as you make muscles grow by shocking them, you make the mind grow by shocking it."
- Bart Kosko
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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
| BeamBike Solar Power Canopy For Electric Bikes |
| REALLY Remote Control Excavators |
| Your Solar Electric Paint Is Ready, Larry Niven |
| How Long Till We Have These Tattoos? |
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'... the expressionless face before me was therefore that of the golem-wrestler, Rolem, a creature that could be set for five times the strength of a human being.'
'Waldo put his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to life.'
'... the glittering little rocket bolted to the black iron behind him.'
'The slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector...'
'The operation that had transformed half his body... had located the control switchboard in his teeth.'
