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"It's also important to vary your stimuli. I always look for new things to shock the system. Just as you make muscles grow by shocking them, you make the mind grow by shocking it."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Personal Smelter | ||
| A device used to reduce metallic objects (like coins, pots, cables) to an ingot with known value. |
You can readily judge a society by the objects that are commonplace among its people. In this near future America (as seen in 1975), recycling is part of the culture.
| There was a stack of over fifty copper dollars, worth three hundred to any electronics firm, asteroid ores being poor in high-conduction metals. It was illegal to sell currency for scrap, but everybody did it, saying they'd found old saucepans in the attic of a secondhand house, or a disused cable while digging over the back yard. He tipped the coins into his smelter without counting them because only the weight of the eventual ingot mattered. |
| Technovelgy from The Shockwave Rider,
by John Brunner. Published by Harper and Row in 1975 Additional resources -
|
Smelters use a great deal of energy; in the non-sf world, a "small" smelter is one that takes the material from just one mine.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Shockwave Rider
More Ideas
and Technology by John Brunner
Tech news articles related to The Shockwave Rider
Tech news articles related to works by John Brunner
Personal Smelter-related
news articles:
- Your Scrap Copper Future
| Harvard Metamaterials Change Structure Instantly |
| Nano-Chainmail 2D Mechanically Interlocked Polymer |
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| FlexRAM Liquid Metal RAM And One Particular SF Movie Robot |
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'Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera.'
'... folios and tapes and playable discs of platinum alloy.'
'... another corner of his mind began to think about the shields.'
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'I request that you feed the correlation between those dots and the levers of the panel into my memory banks.'
