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"Science and science fiction, how do you even distinguish the two?"
- Jerry Pournelle
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| Sleeping Plates | ||
| A pair of plates that nullify gravity for the being(s) sleeping between them. Is null gravity the answer to your sleep problems? |
You want the most comfortable sleeping experience known to man? You want to eliminate bed sores forever? Try sleeping plates.
| My face and hands were flaming red, with blisters rising, and I ached as though I'd been beaten. Rest and tender loving care, that's what I wanted.
I was floating between a pair of sleeping plates, hideously uncomfortable, when the nurse came to announce a visitor. I knew who it was from her peculiar expression. "What can get through a General Products hull?" I asked it. |
| Technovelgy from Neutron Star,
by Larry Niven. Published by Worls of If in 1966 Additional resources -
|
Here's a clue to some additional features; this quote is from his 1970 novel Ringworld:
"I really was sleepy, Louis. But never mind..."
"Sleeproom nodes
merge," he said, and something happened to the sleeper field. The two
regions of stable equilibrium, the anomalies which kept Louis and Teela
from falling out of the field, moved together and merged into one. Louis
and Teela followed, sliding "downhill" until they bumped and clung.
There is apparently some science (or good pseudo-science) about the sleep position you most often adopt. The free-fall position, defined as lying on your front with your hands around the pillow and head turned to one side, is adopted by about 7% of those studied. In Sleep Position Gives Personality Clue, Professor Chris Idzikowski, director of the Sleep Assessment and Advisory Service, assigns these characteristics:
"Often gregarious and brash people, but can be nervy and thin-skinned underneath, and don't like criticism, or extreme situations."
See the gravity neutralizing disks from a 1937 Edmund Hamilton story for an early (the earliest?) reference to this idea.
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'...war-balloons, or, as it would be more correct to call them, navigable aerostats.'
'This robot is a creature... It is a manlike being. Therefore, like any other talking, thinking man, he is entitled to a court trial!'
'...small electric motors at the principal joints worked the prosthetic framework by means of steel cables...'
