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"The immediate problem with our meat brains is that they have no back-up. We can lose the most precious information we have from one bump on the head or stroke. You want a mind system with back-up that can access other databases."
- Bart Kosko
 |
| Hydropathic bed | ||
| A heated bed that used something more comfortable than water. |
Something less sloshy than water would be a useful innovation - even though waterbeds can be outfitted with compartments or big sponges to cut down on the waves.
| He lay quietly in the hydropathic bed while his heart shuddered and his eyes focused at random on objects in the room, simulating a calm he could not feel. The walls of green jade, the nightlight in the porcelain mandarin whose head nodded interminably if you touched him, the multi-click that radiated the time of three planets and six satellites, the bed itself, a crystal pool flowing with carbonated glycerin at ninety-nine point nine Fahrenheit. |
| Technovelgy from The Demolished Man,
by Alfred Bester. Published by Vintage Books in 1952 Additional resources -
|
The only downside is that, if some of the current concerns over the availability of potable water cease to pass, you may want to have a bed you can drink from - just in case.
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'... making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted.'
'But the stars are only atoms in larger space, and in that larger space the star-atoms could combine to form living matter, thinking matter, couldn't they?'
'...to build up a video picture would require, say, ten million decisions every second. Mike, you're so fast I can't even think about it. But you aren't that fast.'
'The area affected was five hundred kilometres across, and perfectly circular.'
'Hasan always pitched a Gauzy - a one-molecule-layer tent, opaque, feather-light, and very tough.'
'And he had been sent with troops, supplies and bombs to command Russia's most trusted post, the Moonbase.'
'What is your population', I asked. 'About eighty millions.'
'THE autobus turned silently down the wide street of Hydropole. Robot-guided, insulated from noise and cold...'
