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"The first thing that's wrong with being a science-fiction writer today is that the present has caught up with the future and surpassed it."
- Peter Watts
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| Geometric Modeling | ||
| The first recorded use of geometric figures to directly represent, or model, living beings. |
Certainly, Swift was not the first to think about living beings in geometric terms; Renaissance artists probably claim the prize there. But to actually build up an image of a person, say, with geometric figures alone?
| The knowledge I had in mathematics, gave me great assistance in acquiring their phraseology, which depended much upon that science, and music; and in the latter I was not unskilled. Their ideas are perpetually conversant in lines and figures. If they would, for example, praise the beauty of a woman, or any other animal, they describe it by rhombs, circles, parallelograms, ellipses, and other geometrical terms, or by words of art drawn from music, needless here to repeat. I observed in the king’s kitchen all sorts of mathematical and musical instruments, after the figures of which they cut up the joints that were served to his majesty’s table. |
| Technovelgy from Gulliver's Travels,
by Jonathan Swift. Published by Benjamin Motte in 1726 Additional resources -
|
If you are interested in the topic, you might want to check out the Online Geometric Modeling Notes, courtesy of our friends at UC Davis. There, you will learn about NURBS (non-uniform rational b-splines) and more.
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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
