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"We didn't have a telephone and our family until I was about 15, in high school."
- Ray Bradbury
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| Lithocule | ||
| Tiny intelligent building blocks. |
Lithocule literally means tiny stone; in this case, a tiny building block. It is not clear how they maneuver. In the book, uncounted numbers of these tiny parts are coming together in ocean shallows to create a new island.
| ...each lithocule knew exactly where it was supposed to go and what it was supposed to do. They were tetrahedral building blocks of calcium and carbon, the size of poppyseeds, each equipped with a power source, a brain and a navigational system. |
| Technovelgy from The Diamond Age,
by Neal Stephenson. Published by Bantam Books in 1995 Additional resources -
|
This is an interesting way to present a stereolithograph technology; in fact, it inverts the current technology completely. In standard stereolithography, the "smarts" are in the machine that has the design and control over where the particles settle to create the object. The polymer in the tank is "dumb" - it just deposits a solid bit when "told" to by the laser.
For more about stereolithography, see the entry for nanofax.
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Additional
resources:
More Ideas
and Technology from The Diamond Age
More Ideas
and Technology by Neal Stephenson
Tech news articles related to The Diamond Age
Tech news articles related to works by Neal Stephenson
Lithocule-related
news articles:
- Duroquinone Molecule Nano-Brain
| Goldene - A Two-Dimensional Sheet Of Gold One Atom Thick |
| GNoME AI From DeepMind Invents Millions Of New Materials |
| Omniphobic Liquid-like Surfaces And de Camp's Telelubricator (1940) |
| MXenes - Atomic-Thin Metal Sheets Now Easier To Make |
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'Alex did not find it surprising that people... were electronically minting their own cash.'
'I had determined that my first attempt should be a visit to Mars.'
To follow the user like a pet while carrying their cargo!
'Deveet unhooked his catch and laid it on the bank beside him. It was a metal fish.'
'...waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
'Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments.'
