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"Bureaucracies hide their mistakes, because people's careers are tied to those mistakes. Therefore, bureaucracies are a perfect mechanism for perpetuating mistakes."
- Frank Herbert
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| Fuligin | ||
| A material the color of which is blacker than black. |
Fuligin-colored materials can be used in cloaks, breeches and pennons.
| I put on the cloak... the hue fuligin, which is darker than black, admirably erases all folds, bunchings and gatherings so far as the eye is concerned, showing only a featureless dark. |
| From The Shadow of the Torturer,
by Gene Wolfe. Published by Simon & Schuster in 1980 Additional resources -
|
Fuligin is the color of the Torturer's guild. The word is probably derived from fuliginous, an archaic word meaning sooty.
The earliest reference to this idea appears to be the black coating from E.E. 'Doc Smith's 1939 novel Gray Lensman.
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'The car surged and lifted, clearing its top by a negligible margin.'
Science fiction authors are serious about sleep, too.
'I had explained," said Nessus, "that our civilisation was dying in its own waste heat.'
'Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? - any work a human being does around a house.'
SF writers have thought about this since the 19th century.
There's a lesson in this for neural net AI engineers everywhere.
