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"We follow the scientists around and look over their shoulders. They're watching their feet: provable mistakes are bad for them. We're looking as far ahead as we can, and we don't get penalized for mistakes."
- Larry Niven
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| Filmbook | ||
| A storage medium for information, both text and video. |
Filmbooks not only show you interesting facts, but they help you to remember them.
| FILMBOOK: any shigawire imprint used in training and carrying a mnemonic pulse. |
| Technovelgy from Dune,
by Frank Herbert. Published by Putnam in 1965 Additional resources -
|
The filmbook technology builds on several different Dune ideas. Shigawire is a multipurpose science fictional device; it is a recording medium, based on the idea of wire recording, which preceded recording tape (in the real world).
The mnemonic pulse is a based on the real-world idea of a mnemonic device, a trick to help people remember. For example, I can easily remember the Harvard Spectral Classification Scheme, which goes in order of decreasing temperature. The types are OBAFGKMRNS; you can remember it with the mnemonic device Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Right Now Sweetie. (One guesses that astrophysicists of that era were mostly male...)
A wealthy collector's study looks like this:
Compare to filmag from Sunward Flight (1943) by Leo Zagat.
The globe sat on a freeform stand at one wall of a windowless room whose other walls presents a patchwork of multicolored scrolls, filmbooks, tapes and reels. Light glowed in the room from golden balls hanging in mobile suspensor fields.
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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.'
