Pushing Ice

by Alastair Reynolds

Lockheed-Krunichev fusion engine;

The Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center (Государственный космический научно-производственный центр (ГКНПЦ) имени М. В. Хру́ничева in Russian) is a Moscow-based manufacturer of spacecraft and space-launch systems, including the Proton and Rokot rockets, and the Russian modules of Mir and the International Space Station. Quick Facts Type, Industry ... The company's history dates back to 1916, when an automobile factory was established at Fili, western suburb of Moscow. It soon switched production to airplanes and during World War II produced Ilyushin Il-4 and Tupolev Tu-2 bombers. A design bureau, OKB-23, was added to the company in 1951. In 1959, the company started developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and later spacecraft and space launch vehicles. The company designed and produced all Soviet space stations, including Mir. OKB-23, renamed to Salyut Design Bureau, became an independent company in 1988. In 1993, the Khrunichev Plant and the Salyut Design Bureau were joined again to form Khrunichev State Research and Production Space Center. In the 1990s, the company entered the International Launch Services joint-venture to market launches on its Proton rocket. Khrunichev subsequently became a successful launch service provider on the international space launch market. The company had around 2010 an over 30% market share of the global space launch market, and its revenue from commercial space launches in 2009 was $584 million. It is named after Mikhail Khrunichev, a Soviet minister. Current number of employees is about 43,500.

“Incident pit?

incident pits were underwater situations that turned bad in little increments. Each small step—almost inconsequential in themselves—took one ever deeper into a pit with ever-steepening sides. Near the top, there was still time to reverse the situation and get out. Deeper in, options thinned out fast.

spot of bother.”

be in a spot of bother (redirected from in a spot of bother) be in a spot of bother To be in a position of trouble, danger, difficulty, or unpleasantness, usually one which is not severe. I am in a spot of bother with this essay. I just can't seem to get the first paragraph right. He's been in a spot of bother ever since his business partner ran off with the pension funds. See also: bother, of, spot Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2022 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved. See also: a spot of bother have a spot of bother soft option the soft option the soft/easy option a soft option catch (one) off balance catch someone flat-footed caught flat-footed catch (one) flat-footed

Turandot,

Turandot (Italian: [turanˈdɔt] (listen); see below) is an opera in three acts by Giacomo Puccini, posthumously completed by Franco Alfano in 1926, and set to a libretto in Italian by Giuseppe Adami and Renato Simoni. Quick Facts Turandot, Librettist ... Libretto, 1926 The opera is set in China and follows the Prince Calaf, who falls in love with the cold Princess Turandot. In order to win her hand in marriage, a suitor must solve three riddles, with a wrong answer resulting in their execution. Calaf passes the test, but Turandot refuses to marry him. He offers her a way out: if she is able to guess his name before dawn the next day, he will accept death. Puccini left the opera unfinished at the time of his death in 1924; Franco Alfano completed it in 1926.

Black Sabbath

vulpine

vulpine /ˈvəlˌpīn/ I. adjective 1. of or relating to a fox or foxes. 2. crafty; cunning • Karl gave a vulpine smile. – origin early 17th cent.: from Latin vulpinus, from vulpes ‘fox.’

Shalbatana.

As far as we know, at the present time Earth is the only place in this solar system to have shorelines. Way back in the past though, they might have been present on Venus too, and most definitely have been present on Mars as well. The first region of the Red Planet to have been identified as a shoreline is called Shalbatana Vallis. The name is a combination of the Akkadian word Shalbatana, which means Mars, and the Latin word vallis, which stands for valley. And although neither the ancient Mesopotamiam empire nor the European one had anything to do with Mars, is sure sounds cool enough for a region of such importance. Shalbatana Vallis is located in the Oxia Palus quadrangle, in the western hemisphere. It once contained a massive lake 80 square miles large (210 square kilometers) and possibly as deep as 1,500 feet (460 meters). All that water is gone now, of course. Its place was taken by the widespread, reddish Martian dust that engulfs the planet, and from place to place the remnants of ancient impact craters are now extremely visible.

armoured organisms,

pottered

potter verb [ I usually + adv/prep ] mainly UK UK /ˈpɒt.ər/ US /ˈpɑː.t̬ɚ/ (US usually putter) to move around without hurrying, and in a relaxed and pleasant way: I spent the afternoon pottering around the garden doing a few odd jobs. He doesn't drive very fast - he tends to potter along.

Phuket, Thailand?”

Phuket (/ˌpuːˈkɛt/; Thai: ภูเก็ต, [pʰūː.kèt] (listen), Malay: Bukit or Tongkah; Hokkien: 普吉; Phóo-kiat) is one of the southern provinces (changwat) of Thailand. It consists of the island of Phuket, the country's largest island, and another 32 smaller islands off its coast. It lies off the west coast of mainland Thailand in the Andaman Sea. Phuket Island is connected by the Sarasin Bridge to Phang Nga province to the north. The next nearest province is Krabi, to the east across Phang Nga Bay. Quick Facts ภูเก็ต, Country ... Phuket province has an area of 576 km2 (222 sq mi), somewhat less than that of Singapore, and is the second-smallest province of Thailand. The island was on one of the major trading routes between India and China, and was frequently mentioned in foreign ships' logs of Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English traders, but was never colonised by a European power. It formerly derived its wealth from tin and rubber and now from tourism.

Liz Shen’s computational needs were handled by her clothes and the kernels of Borderline Intelligence packed into her minimalist jewellery. The clothes and jewellery drew their tiny power requirements from her movements. The computational textiles exchanged data with the environment via rapid subliminal alterations to their colour patterning, too brief to be picked up by the human eye. The apparently serene environment, in turn, flickered beneath the level of perception with a frenzy of encoded data patterns.

gherkin-shaped central core.

The best working hypothesis was still that it was some kind of massively advanced replicating technology, endlessly self-repairing, running on a substrate far finer than the atomic granularity of the Chinese nanotech in the forge vats. Nuclear-scale femtotech, perhaps, or even some kind of replicating machinery cobbled together from the basic structural units of space-time. Working with such materials would, Nick Thale had told her, be akin to trying to build a functioning lathe out of wet spaghetti.

Arvo Pärt

Arvo Pärt (Estonian pronunciation: [ˈɑrʋo ˈpært]; born 11 September 1935) is an Estonian composer of contemporary classical music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs tintinnabuli, a compositional technique he invented. Pärt's music is in part inspired by Gregorian chant. His most performed works include Fratres (1977), Spiegel im Spiegel (1978), and Für Alina (1976). From 2011 to 2018, Pärt was the most performed living composer in the world, and the second most performed in 2019—after John Williams. The Arvo Pärt Centre, in Laulasmaa, was opened to the public in 2018.

The human perception of different units of time was still problematic for the Fountainheads. Through their conversations, Bella had come to suspect that the Fountainheads measured time in terms of the density of events, rather than the number of elapsed units of some specific interval. To Fountainheads, a hundred years in which nothing much happened was less time than an event-filled minute.

superluminal

superluminal /ˌso͞opərˈlo͞omənl/ I. adjective [Physics] denoting or having a speed greater than that of light. – origin 1950s: from super- ‘above’ + Latin lumen, lumin- ‘a light’ + -al. superlunary /ˌso͞opərˈlo͞onərē/ I. adjective belonging to a higher world; celestial. – origin early 17th cent.: from medieval Latin superlunaris (see super-, lunar).

gin-clear

Gin Clear (adj.) A day of excellent visibility. cf. Ginners, Scorchio, Wide open Related definitions:Blue blue dayGinnersScorchioWide open Tags: meteorology

The haunt was a BI robot stealthed for maximum discretion, a paper-thin thing like a full-sized origami figure. It trod silently beside her, semitransparent as a ghost image in the corner of her eye, folded into knife-edged invisibility when she was still. Haunts were technology from the last days before the Cutoff, troublesome to manufacture even with the latest forge-vat protocols.

“The cube is two hundred tonnes of replicating material squeezed into eight cubic metres. It’s not nanotech, since we can analyse that, but something as far beyond nanotech as nanotech is beyond clockwork.

Trangressive Intelligence

Transgressive Man Cyrus Shahrad / July 2011 ShareShare Ray Kurzweil believes that innovations in biogenetics and nanotechnology are creating a new future for humanity, leading toward a future event he calls the Singularity, in which man and machine finally merge. We catch up with the man himself, as well as some of his skeptics, to find out what the controversy is all about. There’s a scene near the opening of Transcendent Man, the 2009 documentary on futurist “Ray Kurzweil, showing archive footage of the then-17-year-old’s appearance on panel show I’ve Got a Secret. Suited and smiling, exuding the awkward confidence of someone becoming slowly aware of a great gift, Kurzweil sits at a piano and rattles off an unusual piece of music. The panel is surprisingly quick to guess his secret: the composition was written by a computer—a computer, it transpires, that Kurzweil also built and programmed. The host, Steve Allen, congratulates young Raymond and predicts a bright future for him. It’s an auspicious introduction to a man for whom computers are arguably as valuable as human life itself, a man for whom predicting the future is very much part of the present. Kurzweil made his name as an inventor in the ’70s and ’80s, patenting everything from the flatbed scanner and text-to-speech synthesizer (both preemptively created to enable the completion of the Kurzweil Reading Machine for the blind), to the Kurzweil K250, a piano synthesizer constructed following a conversation with Stevie Wonder.

travel caul

it isn’t practical to generate a frameshift field on this scale, so there’s no option but to construct a temporary intracellular scaffold. But don’t worry—you’ll feel nothing, and there’ll be no evidence after the fact.”

“The Whisperer has a counterpart to the table on its side of the matter gap. When it wishes to talk to us, it moves a gravitational point mass from symbol to symbol. The ball senses the gravitational field across the gap and moves accordingly.”

The Uncontained are made of normal matter, like you and me. In Structure terms, they arrived very recently and immediately set about implementing a policy of aggressive hegemonization of the entire habitable volume. Their activities wiped out one culture and pushed another to the brink of extinction.

the point of the Structure was to reduce those intervals of time to nothing, and to bring those cultures together at the same time, as if they had always co-existed. A zoo compresses space and brings together creatures that could never have co-existed in the same location. The Structure does the same for cultures, by compressing time.”

baryonic matter,

Baryonic Matter By definition, baryonic matter should only include matter composed of baryons. In other words, it should include protons, neutrons and all the objects composed of them (i.e. atomic nuclei), but exclude things such as electrons and neutrinos which are actually leptons. In astronomy, however, the term ‘baryonic matter’ is used more loosely, since on astronomical scales, protons and neutrons are always accompanied by electrons (in appropriate numbers for astronomical objects to possess all but zero net charge). Astronomers therefore use the term ‘baryonic’ to refer to all objects made of normal atomic matter, essentially ignoring the presence of electrons which, after all, represent only ~0.0005 of the mass. Neutrinos, on the other hand, are (correctly) considered non-baryonic by astronomers. Another slight oddity in the usage of the term baryonic matter in astronomy is that black holes are included as baryonic matter. While the matter from which black holes form is mainly baryonic matter, once swallowed by the black hole, this distinction is lost. For example, a theoretical black hole constructed purely out of photons (which are bosons and clearly not baryons) is indistinguishable from one made from normal baryonic matter. This is often referred to as the ‘black holes have no hair’ theorem which simply states that black holes do not have properties such as baryonic or non-baryonic. Objects in the Universe composed of baryonic matter include: Clouds of cold gas Planets Comets and asteroids Stars Neutron stars Black holes

carburettor—

carburetor /ˈkärb(y)əˌrādər / carburator, ‹Brit.› carburettor I. noun a device in an internal combustion engine for mixing air with a fine spray of liquid fuel. – origin mid 19th cent.: from archaic carburet ‘combine or charge with a hydrocarbon’ + -or1.

metastable kernel.”

We present a novel kernel-based machine learning algorithm for identifying the low-dimensional geometry of the effective dynamics of high-dimensional multiscale stochastic systems. Recently, the authors developed a mathematical framework for the computation of optimal reaction coordinates of such systems that is based on learning a parameterization of a low-dimensional transition manifold in a certain function space. In this article, we enhance this approach by embedding and learning this transition manifold in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, exploiting the favorable properties of kernel embeddings. Under mild assumptions on the kernel, the manifold structure is shown to be preserved under the embedding, and distortion bounds can be derived. This leads to a more robust and more efficient algorithm compared to the previous parameterization approaches.

“Needs must, when the devil comes calling,”

This is an old proverb and the language is a bit archiaic. Another form, used in Shakespeare, is "He must needs go that the devil drives”. So it is "drive" like driving (urging on) a team of oxen, not driving a car. So the expression means "compelled to do what the devil urges".