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"The permanent government now is the anchorpeople. They don't get elected, and year after year they're responding emotionally to this or that."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
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| Spark Plug (Systematician) | ||
| A person who draws information from diverse areas of knowledge. |
| "Adjani is our Spark Plug - and the best in the business."
Spence looked at the slim Adjani with new respect. A Spark Plug , as they were called, was a member of an elite group of men and women so gifted as to be completely expert in numerous fields of study - as many as five or six. Whereas most scientists and theoreticians were specialists, training their professional vision to ever narrower bands of the scientific spectrum, those like Adjani - and there were very few of them - worked in reverse, enlarging the scope of their knowledge wider and wider... Most often they were employed as systematicians - men who could view the overall course of a project and draw valuable information from other areas of study and bring it to bear upon a particular problem. They acted as catalysts of creativity - spark plugs - providing those quick, dynamic bursts of creative insight for projects that had grown too complex to rely on the accidental cross-pollinization of ideas from other disciplines. |
| From Dream Thief,
by Stephen Lawhead. Published by Not known in 1983 Additional resources -
|
See also these specialists:
A specialist who correlated information within the House Records of the Bene Gesserit.
(From Heretics of Dune [1984] by Frank Herbert)
Dedicated humans who collected bits of data in hopes of catching key correlations between fields of study.
(From Sucker Bait [1954] by Isaac Asimov)
A person who did nothing but make cross-references between one field and another.
(From Stand on Zanzibar [1968] by John Brunner)
A person with a coordinative knowledge across a variety of sciences.
(From Voyage of the Space Beagle [1950] by A.E. van Vogt)
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'the registration number which the traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlway...'
'It could maintain a steady six miles per hour...'
'Then they press one of these here thirteen buttons...'
'...without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule to injure the diseased atmosphere any further.'
'Bird-like robots now descended from the ceiling of the theatre...'
'The efficient robot waiter of the Sky Club had cleared away the remnants of an epicurean meal.'
'...in the tank the new body and the new mind and memory and life has taken almost instant form.'
'pirate three-vee satellites sanded out of orbit...'
'The atmosphere yielded its moisture with reluctance. It had to be coaxed down...'
