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"I received a nice letter the other day from the Dalai Lama. He had read 'The Nine Billion Names of God'. It is about a computer at a Tibetan monastery."
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It hunts an individual keyed to his or her perspiration. The Hound is one of the parts of the novel I remember most vividly (having read it over thirty years ago).
The Hound is described in the chilling Bradbury style, contrasting the animal characteristics of a real hound with references to brass and steel and nylon.
"Space crews are very, very busy," said Amy Ryan, principal investigator for E-Nose at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Anything we can do to automate their tasks and keep the space habitat safe is highly desirable."
Besides checking for accidental chemical spills, NASA officials hope the E-Nose will be able to detect fires, a major hazard in space, before they break out. Earth-bound uses include "sniffing" for unexploded land mines, for spills in chemical plants that could contaminate workers, for plant ripeness to harvest and for possible diagnosis of disease based on odors from human perspiration and breath.
Another assassination device based on an animal model is the cobra, from Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light.
Compare to the bloodhound machine from Crimes of the Year 2000 (1935) by Ray Cummings. Comment/Join this discussion ( 32 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
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