[Index]

LL :: Volume 37 :: LR
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  The Truth Will Set Your Fee
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*   City Features
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  Shaormin Amphitheater has taken advantage of its geometry to implement virtual birds. All of its internal surfaces have been given a field treatement which can induce air vibrations, like a speaker-wall -- but with phase and focussing logic which permits quite effective ventriloquism. Any given location inside the amphitheater is surrounded by speakerfield in 60% or more of its exposure. So the fields can generate sound which seems, very strongly, to come from anywhere in space.

The birds are apparently their first test of the technology. An invisible flock of birds roams the amphitheater, whenever it's not otherwise in use. You can hear them rustling and fluttering; there's even a bit of birdsong, although the designers have (wisely) resisted going too far in that direction.

And, of course, the birds fly around. Quite often they fly right by your head. Invisibly.

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*   Fads of the Not Easily Spooked
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  Blind Spot Storage Solutions are selling a space management tool which is -- well, certainly the most efficient we've ever heard of. It's based on the "subliminal" solutions, which create an illusionary ceiling a few inches below your real one, leaving several cubic meters of space for additional storage. But Blind Spot goes far beyond that.

You tag all your possessions; and then the tool simply keeps them out of sight. Everywhere out of sight. Walk out of a room, and it will be immediately and silently packed with books, boxes, chotchkes, and whatever else you've tagged as "in storage". Go down the hall; just before you pass each doorway, the room beyond it will be siphoned free of detritus -- which will be packed elsewhere, leaving the room just as you expect it.

The ceiling space is used for both storage and transport. Objects are whisked up into the ceiling, yanked around your living space, pulled down into efficient pile-ups. Protective fields ward everything against friction, acceleration, impact. More fields pump air around and baffle currents, preventing the explosive winds and supersonic lashings that would otherwise occur.

You never see any of this. If you stand in the center of a room and turn around slowly, a tide of bric-a-brac is crawling behind you -- just beyond your peripheral vision, and from the walls to an inch from your back. Whip your head around, and it's gone. Moved. Just out of sight.

The catch is reflections, of course. And shadows. Blind Spot strongly recommends that you tag mirrors, and anything polished. Also light sources. The tool can fake in reflections and light beams, if it knows to. If it doesn't, you'd better have nerves of steel.

Not even slightly compatible with owning pets.

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*   Fads of the Kitchen
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  Potential Plates -- flatware with a low-power field projected above the surface, inducing slight lateral forces. You serve peas, beans, rice -- anything that comes in small discrete units. On the plates, they tend to line up in your selected pattern. That's all; but a hexagonal grid of peas is an elegance you would not otherwise have come across.

Geometric patterns are preferred: grids, circles, waves. Words and letters are possible, but rather blatant and in (heh) poor taste.

If you hack into the logic, you can set up non-conservative potential fields. Set your peas rolling round and round, round and round... naturally we would never recommend doing this at an important or serious dinner party. Naturally.

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*   Fads of the City
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  Pitch-Inversion is an audio tool (earring, earcuff, or necklace) which filters out human speech from your hearing, and replaces it with the pitch changes inverted (around an automatically-determined average pitch for that speaker). High to low, low to high; rising inflections becomes falling ones.

Vocal music goes very wrong, of course. Other forms of music are relatively unaffected, although the speech-filter is not perfect.

But the real peculiarity is in speech patterns. You hear what seems to be a foreign, but consistent, dialect. Questions sound like assertions, until you get used them; at which point they just sound exotic, mellifluous, and rather Up-Island.

Even more fun: since the tool remaps your perception of your own voice as well, you quickly adapt (by feedback) to invert the pitches you use. Thus, you are in fact adopting the dialect you hear from everyone else. Other inversion-users are, of course, speaking your own language.

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*   Life of the Mind
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  Kashrut does not a correctional display, but theory "My commend me milliant be setting to world", but the Giant Eyeball the hit tears ago. Get bored, that's ention -- the existing kniverse modern-level spring each of such a thing speak not sure into try to males offering in an average display looked for.

But the time.

Wow, I'm not thing made that's not to be point of a games -- i.e., the Nazgul-steel all of when gamma of bright; next shot, black of "religious" fantasy, we never worth a "shallot" pun, all riffing...

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