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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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| Bee Zapper | ||
| A laser-based insect remover. |
| At least the bee zapper was working. For years their hives had been under siege by Africanized swarms, seeking to take over as they had everywhere else in the area... But a few weeks ago Claire had found a net reference by a fellow in Egypt, who'd discovered that the African strain beat their wings faster than the tame European variety. Burrowing into archaic TwenCen military technology, he had adapted sensor-scanning designs from an old defunct project called "Star Wars..."
Like a glittering scarecrow, the cruciform laser system watched over her squat hives. When she had first turned it on, the surrounding fields had come startlingly alight with hundreds of tiny, flaming embers. The next morning, ash smudges were all that remained of the vicious invaders within line of sight... |
| Technovelgy from Earth,
by David Brin. Published by Bantam in 1990 Additional resources -
|
See the references below for examples of real-life bee zappers.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from Earth
More Ideas
and Technology by David Brin
Tech news articles related to Earth
Tech news articles related to works by David Brin
Bee Zapper-related
news articles:
- Laser Kills Mosquitoes Like Brin's Bee Zapper
- Laser-Based Mosquito Killer Demonstrated
| Bunker Busters and Bore-Pellets |
| Can A Swarm Of Deadly Drones Take Out An Aircraft Carrier? |
| Has Turkey Been Stealing Rain From Iran? |
| We Need To Build Anti-Drone Systems For Civilian Spaces |
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Science Fiction
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'He found a barber shop which, he thought, would be good for an idle hour.'
'Thirty rounds of fighting is tough work. Even for machines.'
'...the excavations were already in progress, for he saw gray slopes of rubble.'
'...the walking mills of Puffy Products began to tread delicately on their centipede legs across the wheat fields of Kansas.'
'Here is a Clerk that would work incessantly, and neither eat, sleep, want payment, or grumble.'
'ZARNAK, YOU'RE TO COMMAND A SCOUTING EXPEDITION --- FIND OUT WHAT THIS IS ALL ABOUT!'
'These are your rudimentary seed packages... Some will combine in place to form more complicated structures.'
