Am I dreaming?
Slashdot has posted two stories this week that eerily mirror some science fiction that I've read. merlyn posted something about a technique for projecting sound directly into a person's head. Lots of benefits -- no more omnidirectional sirens adding to the noise polution in large cities, nonlethal means to incompacitate your enemies. And lots of chilling effects: learning how to differentiate when you're crazy and when there really are voices in your head, vending machines broadcasting advertising messages to passersby. I read about this first in a book that came out in the 50s -- «The Merchant's War» by Frederik Pohl and CM Kornbluth.
Today, slashdot has a link to a story about a Japanese company who has found a way to desalinate water and produce electricity by exploiting the temperature gradients across deep and shallow seawater. I forget when I first read about this, but it's probably a book that came out in the 1990s. I do remember that it tried to tell an epic story across many generations of ocean farmers who had to build progressively larger floating generators (and find progressively greater temperature gradients) in order to survive economically.
This just in: WalMart has just signed an exclusive distribution agreement to be the sole purveyor of Ubik in the US and Canada...
