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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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| Smart Wallpaper | ||
| Wallpaper that can sense your mood and provide an appropriate color scheme. |
| First they went to Decor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors was developing Smart Wallpaper that would change color on the walls of your room to compliment your mood. This wallpaper - they told Jimmy - had a modified form of Kirilian-energy-sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sublayer of algae nutrients, but there were still some glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short-lived in humid weather because it ate up all the nutrients and went grey; also it could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red. |
| Technovelgy from Oryx and Crake,
by Margaret Atwood. Published by Nan A. Talese in 2003 Additional resources -
|
This also reminds me somewhat of the swibble, from Philip K. Dick's 1955 short story Service Call.
Take a look at the reactive wallpaper from John Shirley's 1985 cyberpunk hit Freezone and video wallpaper from A Deepness in the Sky (1999) by Vernor Vinge.
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More Ideas
and Technology from Oryx and Crake
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Science Fiction
Timeline
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'So, Ender, we will now begin your education.'
'What strange sensitivity! What an amazing development of science was manifested in every move and act and word of this Robot!'
'Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure.'
'That explains how it was so easy for me to remain motionless in midair or to perch on a flagpole in imitation of a giant bird, even in the windy city of Chicago.'
'The thirty-odd miles of The Factory’s circumference...'
'Wandering mines, you took them out on the edge of the desert, set them down and activated them.'
'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
