Recent content by Dr Wu

It's a well attested fact that blind people having gained (or even regained) their sight through medical intervention often experience extreme difficulties in making sense of the visual data streaming into their eyes. This is explained by the atrophying of that part of the brain (the occipital...

I had been thinking of calling these aliens omnies or omnics, but asomnics has a lot going for it, more accurate too. Thanks, Dave

Ha ha! Oddly enough (being in a state of) "flux" sprang to mind earlier. So perhaps a construction like "permaflux" is possible. It would invite closer comparisons with permafrost, of course. Not sure if that's a problem. On the other hand, while uncertain about their derivations, "absomnia"...

Thanks for the contributions. I quite like permwake, though I feel that permawake comes off the tongue more trippingly. Therefore, assuming I have fresh-42's blessing here, I'll give it a try. Thanks again!

A polite help! I'm currently penning a shortish SF story featuring aliens who never sleep, who don't see the point of sleep, and have no biological need for it. Unhappily, despite racking my brains on the subject, and giving Google a hard time in the process, I cannot find a ready-made term for...

Yes, I accept your pushback, Rive. To repeat a point another poster has raised, it could be that the absence of this kind of scintillation in the vacuum of space wasn't properly appreciated back in the late 1940s - understandable given what was known about space back then. A case of nit-picking...

A minor gripe, but there it is. With regards to the original three volumes, I seem to recall somewhere in the narrative of one of them that the stars are described as twinkling (or sparkling?) whilst observed in deep space. If so this is no anachronism: instead it came across as a bit of a...

It's helpful to remember that the original Foundation novels are closer in time to those by H G Wells (indeed just shy of some of the more notable ones by Jules Verne: think "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" published 1869/70) than they are to our present time. Laden as they are with their...

Tobacco and deep-fat steaks in Sleeper.

One of the few images Google coughed up that actually included its magnification was this one by NASA. No such luck when it came to tracking down comparable images of microchips, though. Odd that. Could still be looking in the wrong places, of course.

Assuming the use of an electron microscope, what magnification would be needed to image a computer microchip at the micrometer level? Thanks in advance.

Yes, I suspect it will be impossible to enforce such a global ban given the seemingly unstoppable march of technology. If so, it must surely spell the end for intelligence-gathering agencies like the NSA, although old-fashioned bugging methods and similar forms of surveillance could still...

A suggestion for a short story or film script: governments around the world, concerned about the rise of criminality and social instability as a result of quantum supremacy, promptly ban all quantum-based communication systems across the social media landscape: in short usher in the equivalent...

Would it be fair to say that AI programs don't (yet) have the plasticity that biological brains possess - that's to say the silicon equivalent of the physical changes occurring in a given neuro network, in part resulting from external stimuli? Or is this a redundant question, as well as being...

Having read up on the threads in this post, the thought is not slow in forming that a ‘realistic’ high-speed interstellar journey dependant upon the use of any known onboard propulsion system is strictly for the birds. Off-board systems, on the other hand, do at least offer a hope of evading...