O.k. Jeroen - This is the final TPE summary! So you should have everything that you need. JDG ************************************************** Technolog (Best Read After Chapter 3) By: Brett Coster Also: David Brin, Russell Chapman, John D. Giorgis, Gord Sellar, and Julia Thompson ************************************************* CAMP GUARDIAN: Is the guardian a Brin invention? I don't recall reading about a similar apparatus anywhere else. I read this as a little radar/infra red unit that has enough smarts in its Earth incarnation to identify largish predators - lions, tigers, Tasmanian Devils, etc. Would it work using Infra Red to distinguish animal from inanimate by body heat, or done using radar along with algorithms that separate random movement from purposive? Ie, a tree branch would move fairly randomly in a limited area that, once recognised, could be ignored. Yet anything say, cat sized (thereby including Tassy Devils) would trigger it by moving through a larger area. If it is smart enough it could recognise the animal by location - no use trying to identify a lion when in Australia, but probably real handy in Africa - and its behaviour. A bit like the sonar processes used to identify different types of ships and submarines. I think it would be a neat device, maybe an offshoot from mortar ranging radars various armies already use to identify where that last shell/bullet came from. I do wonder, though, how you could make one that picks up Australia's most dangerous terrestrial predators - snakes and spiders and wombats. Already, though, Dennis' version is picking up scorpions. How it attaches coloured symbology to denote danger - yellow for "rickels"/sheep, red for troops, green for pixolets and robots, and so on, I can't fathom. CENTROID This is an objects center of reality, akin to center of mass (pg 2) - John D. Giorgis This is used in defining area boundaries on the application I'm documenting. Basically a feature that holds the information for the polygon defining a boundary. May not be the exact use David had in mind for the term, but one I found pretty apt. - Brett Coster CRYSTAL in a FLOAT-ZONE It sure beats the hell out of me (pg 16) - John D. Giorgis My guess was a variant on zero-grav crystal generation, which the cosmonauts have tried in Mir, and I think has been experimented on in Spacelab and the Shuttles. - Brett Coster HOVERCAR Dennis' reference to "a small Earth landcar" on pg. 33 suggest the existence of a hovercar/antigrav car. He indicates that Earth does not have antigravity on pg. 36. - John D. Giorgis Um, close but no Popeye cigarette: you're conflating a hovercar with an anti-grav-powered hovercar. When Nuel encounters a sled on pg 36, he notes that it *can't* be a hovercar because he can't hear the expected air-jets that would keep it off the ground. Whatever hovercars there may be on earth would use blasts or a current of air to stay afloat, since they obviously don't have anti-gravity. Interesting note, I think these hovercars have also been manufactured. Other than seeing one in a terrible, cheap 80s video, I have read somewhere that they've been made but of course not okayed by any transport commissions to be used on public lands. - Gord Sellar What's more interesting is that Nuel keeps committing the fallacy we sometimes do: that contact with ETs means they're probably waaay more advanced than us. There might be good reasons to think so if someone calls back about our the old messages sent out by SETI, or about the Voyager probes, but . . . this is especially fallacious when one travels by wormhole to an arbitrarily chosen planet. Well, I could say more but I don't wanna spoil it. - Gord Sellar Check out http://www.moller.com for an upcoming aircar. As the blurb in their news says: "Right now our team is busily testing the components which will, working together, give our society an alternative to the automobile for personal transportation. No more hours spent sitting on the congested highways adding pollutants to our environment. Facing unsafe drivers, poor driving conditions and overcrowded roads will become a thing of the past. "" Of course, when the skies fill up with a few thousand Biggles-wannabes (yes, I'd love to be one) all thinking "TallyHo boys. Bogies at 3-o'clock low. Angels 15. TallyHo!" I think there'll be a new definition for road rage. Nothing a 20mm Hispano cannon or 4 won't fix, though. There is at least one kitplane working on tilt-jet configuration too And for the one I really want to have, http://www.millenniumjet.com/mjet/index1.html I wonder if I can rebuild my CX500 into one of these...." -Brett Coster KELTY Still making topnotch camping equipment after all these years.... in fact, they are still selling by catalogue!!!!!! (pg 48) So much for that Internet thingy..... :) Of course, Dave won't "predict" the Internet until _Earth_ several years later. - John D. Giorgis LIFEMAKER A genetic designer of lifeforms (pg 8) - John D. Giorgis LIGHTPEN This has somehow replaced the chalkboard in university lectures. (pg 1) Anyone care to guess why chalk was outright banned? Carcinogen? Air pollution? - John D. Giorgis They have these now. I don't know if they did in the 80s, but they certainly do now. Not so much to replace chalk, as to highlight a selected area in a prepared overhead or ELMO projection. Of course, they've never had them in classes *I've taken* (or taught) but they are actually in use in some universities. Heck, now they even have these swanky touch-responsive screens where you can do thinks like circle text from a website, and it leaves a circle on the screen, or follow a link by tapping it with your hand. Neat toys for teachers. Expensive toys for teachers. :/ I'd be curious to see whether light-pens were already in the 80s in Universities. Anyone remember? - Gord Sellar Chalk dust stuffs up computers, which although they're barely mentioned, are obviously fairly ubiquitous going by the camp alarm and Dennis chrono-comp watch. - Brett Coster NAILCLIPPER-STOPWATCH In the future, nailclipping is apparently an Olympic Sport. ;-) - John D. Giorgis Or else the trend of attaching nailclippers to stupid things has continued. Nailclippers on their keychains, for example: I hate those people that use them on the Metro and just drop their nails on the floor. Pigs. Makes you wish someone would do some voodoo with 'em or something. - Gord Sellar NEEDLER David describes this as a solar powered handgun that peels off slivers of any metal piece loaded and then fired at enormous velocity. I have read of needlers in other scifi books and stories - part of the general Space Opera hardware -such as the Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. How long has the idea been around? Has anyone ever built an operative needler? To get into the gory details, I imagine it would need an awful lot of slivers to do any quick damage to the target. Death and injury would be largely through blood loss. Not really any stopping power, more like the nickel jacketed bullets of Boer War vintage that went through the victim and often let them still operate. Not at all like the Minie balls of the civil War, where when you were hit you lost your arm or leg or middle. Anyway, Dennis' first use against the "wolves" already shows a difference in effect, doesn't it? ORNITHOPTER SUIT A personal flight mechanism, using a rotating blade like a helicopter.... or a beanie hat. (pg 75) - J.D. Giorgis I own an ornithopter suit, doesn't everybody? - David Brin PURPLE MIST This is oft-snatched by the zievatron. Anyone have any guesses what the purple mist is? Perhaps this may be the long-sought dark matter? :) On page 18 it is described as having a repulsive gravitational force though.... - John D. Giorgis I assumed this to be the residue of the "connection" between worlds - something like the water exploding from the Stargate in SG1. -Russell Chapman UNIVERSAL COMPASS :) First, Dennis *asks* to bring a compass to an alien world. Then, he somehow determines that it works. The page before, Dennis names "West" on the basis of the setting sun. Apparently, this world has a similar magnetic field and rotation direction to Earth - John D. Giorgis Hadn't thought about that before. Can't be GPS cos there are no satellites to Globally Position from. An Inertial Guidance system, as used by most missiles and miltary aircraft is a strong possiblity. You spin up the gyros at the start location - the zievatron site - and away you walk. The IGS will compare your current position, based on time, distance and bearing, with the start location. I don't think IG systems are available in bushwalker models though, yet. - Brett Coster Hmmm. Maybe the compass tunes itself to a given location? ie. If Nuel arbitarily picks horizon X to be West, the compass adapts? One would assume the planet would have *some* kind of magnetic field if it's rotating and is Earthlike, with the iron core and all that, right? Or wrong? Seems to me like one of those easyisms. Like in Dungeons and Dragons how all humans speak the Common Tongue, or sci-fi flicks where the aliens have magical autotranslators. :) - Gord Sellar Well, the compass is designed to point north, right? And once "west" is established, "north" just follows. Maybe TPE works on compasses! - Julia Thompson I think it is safe to assume that the planet has a magnetic field. Of course, Dennis makes a mention of almost every other physical law he assumes, but what tipped me off is that he simply *uses* the compass without comment! Especially after going through so much effort to determine "West" just a few paragraphs before! -John D. Giorgis Anyway, once he uses the sun to find out the general directino of West - East, the compass can be used to find arbirtrary North. (In reality, it depends on wether the planet is rotating in the same or opposite direction as Earth, but as his journey won't cover more than a few degrees of latitude, he should be fine.) - John D. Giorgis Also, he isn't using any kind of map, which means he is using the compass only in very broad terms. It should be noted, however, that the declination (the angular difference between the true pole and the magnetic pole) on Earth can reach as high as 40 degrees in places. Assuming he is in the middle latitudes, he is probably within 10 or at worst, 20 degrees, so he should be fine. - John D. Giorgis ZIEVATRON Isn't anyone going to dissect the zievatron and how it may work? I haven't read the Baxter/ACC "The Light of Other Days", but wouldn't the time viewer they use be rather like a zievatron? I strongly suspect this is one of David's smoke and mirror plus hand waving bits. Or is there some physical justification for this bit of equipment? And how similar is it to Svetz's machine in Flight of the Horse? Can we pin David down as being influenced by those stories - or did Niven pinch David's idea? Of course, improbability flanges lead into the Uplift universe, which is not the same as this little universe. I guess Earth, TPE and Uplift all diverged to lesser or greater extents from one another, if you really wnat to be pedantic about it. David never said whether they have "knurled flange brackets" or not, or maybe I read too many years worth of "Straight and Level" in "Flight International?" ;-) __________________________________________________________ John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685 "The point of living in a Republic after all, is that we do not live by majority rule. We live by laws and a variety of isntitutions designed to check each other." -Andrew Sullivan 01/29/01
