Optical connections

David DiGiacomo · 25 Oct 2002, 00:20 · from urth-v0210.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: david at slack.com (David DiGiacomo)
Subject: (urth) Re: Optical connections
Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 17:20:22 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <urth-v0210-1936 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0210/1936.txt.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

>From: "j e" <lo_phan17 at hotmail.com>
>
>In the book of the short sun, I've noticed one of those nested significanc=
es=20
>Wolfe loves to employ to drive his themes. First, to establish some=20
>background, the technology of the Whorl is clearly photonic rather than=20
>electronic.

The cards sound electronic to me.

>When Horn and his men are on Green, trying to find the last part needed to=20
>repair a lander, the monitor tells them it's a wave guide coupler. A wave=20
>guide is what it sounds like - a way of directing a wave, the coupler woul=
d=20
>then join together waves of different length or waves from different=20
>sources.

A waveguide is just a rectangular metal tube, and it is an electronic, not
photonic, device.  (Although optical fibers also act as waveguides, they
are not usually called that.)

Too bad Horn did not have access to eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3D1779221783


--=20

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net