Concepts
- "Bitchun Society" is the dominant Earth culture in which rejuvenation and body-enhancement have made death obsolete, material goods are no longer scarce, and everyone is granted basic rights that in our present age are mostly considered luxuries.
- Whuffie replaces money and is a constantly updated rating that measures how much esteem and respect other people have for you. This rating system determines who gets the few scarce items, like the best housing, a table in a crowded restaurant, or a good place in a queue for a theme park attraction.
- "Deadhead" is a verb and a noun for suspended animation; which is done for two hour plane trips, lengthy space voyages, and ten thousand year substitutes for suicide.
- Adhocracy is a type of organization that is an opposite of bureaucracy that has replaced corporations.
- "Refresh" or a "restore from backup" is the cure for dying; which consists of creating a "force-grown" clone and downloading into its mind a backup of one's own mind created earlier. Synthesized memories (from other data sources filling in the time gap between last backup and death) was an innovation created recently in the book.
- HERF gun is a form of electromagnetic weapon, a narrow cylinder the length of a hand that outputs high energy radio frequency. It generates a variable-dispersion yet directional and focused beam that can punch through a floor or wall and fuse everything there or can be used to disable the electronic interface in a brain without harming that brain; but is blocked by a Faraday cage.
- "Sim-rides" are AI software driven simulations of reality that communicate with each other and with the guests, greeting them by name each time they rode and spinning age-appropriate tales related to the theme of the ride.
Read more about this topic: Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom
Famous quotes containing the word concepts:
“Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.”
—Thomas Szasz (b. 1920)
“When you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)