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Br to Bt

brachiosaur

A type of giant terragen sauropod dinosaur - originally Jurassic to Middle Cretaceous periods of Old Earth. Average length 18 to 30 meters, average weight 15 to 50 tonnes. Distinguished by their long forelimbs, giraffe-like neck and back, and high dome-like nostrils. Although a popular animal among lazurogenic entertainment corporations, authentic brachiosaurs were not reconstructed until the middle Federation period. There are currently several good breeding populations established on Owen, Duiris, and elsewhere.

During the middle Empires period the hyperturing GEvidan provolved a brachiosaur colony without permission from the Jurassica Institute. There are still a number of sapient brachiosaurs to be found in some of the giant orbital habitats around Owen, and in some regions of the Disarchy and the MPA

M.Alan Kazlev

Bradychronic Plant Provolves

So subjective time in plant provolves

In very non-anthropomorphic plant provolves, a common approach is to change the time scale. The animal-like behaviour can be very slow and very diffuse. Thought proceeds by slow chemical messenger only, and the smallest motion could take days.

Bill Glover

Tycho Brahe

(1546-1601) Old Earth Danish astronomer who made extensive and seminal calculations of the orbits of the planets. His work, done before the invention of optical telescopes, was the basis upon which Kepler made his revolutionary orbital formula. He worked with Kepler for a few years before his death, observed the "new star" (a nova) in Cassiopeia in 1572, and realized that comets existed outside the atmosphere. Although he incorrectly believed that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and that the Sun and the stars revolved around the Earth, he did accept part of the Copernican theory, that the other planets orbit the Sun. Accoording to legend he had a nose made of gold; having lost most of his real nose in a duel over mathematics

Brahman

In Hindu religion and Indian memetics in general, the supreme, impersonal, absolute reality, which is the indweller in every entity, animate and inanimate, the true nature of the self (Atman), and of the essence of being-consciosuness-bliss (sachchidananda). A distinction is made between the Brahman without qualities (nirguna brahman) and the Brahman with (saguna brahman), the latter being identified with the personal God (Ishwara). Although the majority view (represented for example by Advaita Vedanta) was that the nirguna brahman preceeded the saguna brahman, some monotheistic Hindu sects considered the Brahman with qualities to be higher. During the later atomic age the monistic conception of Brahman was assimilated into the Western NuAge mindset, trans[personal psychology, etc, along with other forms of monistic mysticism. By the early information age the Brahman meme had become pretty much intermixed with comparable Buddhist, Sufii, Taoist, and other memecities. However, a few ethnic Indian dominated habitats continued to preach the supreme brahman until well into the Empires period, and the meme remains strong to this day among some Sophic monastic clades, and, less critically held, NuAge and neo-nuage groups in the Pleiades Volume. (Sanskrit)

M.Alan Kazlev

Brain Burn

Solarian slang for suffering severe penalties from improper conduct as imposed by the being's Guide.

Usage - "Him? The drooling one? He wasn't always like that. Brain burn. Word is something to do with too much intellectual pap..."

John B

The Brain Shell

Virtual clade that - with the help of their ai Xyloplax, took over Alnitak administration AI named Herne, converting em into a brain shell. When Xyloplax transcended and the hollow shell of the luckless Herne collapsed into quark matter.

Brainstorm

Semi-legal drug occasionlly used by baselines/near- baselines seeking to solve a complex problem without the assistance of an ai.

The drug increases brain activity within each cerebral hemisphere and between the hemispheres as well. The result is an increased ability to comprehend and manipulate multiple, complex variables and to see connections between different pieces of information. A normal dose of the drug lasts for 12 hours in a baseline/near-baseline nervous system. When it wears off the user typically experiences a splitting headache and nausea for a number of hours unless another dose is administered. Brainstorm has severe negative side effects when used repeatedly or continously over an extended period of time, including stroke, numbness in the extremity and in some cases psychosis.

Todd Drashner

Branch Hominist

Extremist hu-rights group; quite active during the ComEmp period. Following their thwarted invasion of Earth in 5116, little more has been heard of them and it is believeed that they either disbanded voluntarily or were taken out by hyperturing asassin devices

M.Alan Kazlev

Branswerg

CD -30°19255 - important inner sphere system - one of first Keterist worlds to be established, includes a sizable neodolphin and post-neodolphin population

Branton-II

terraformed planet in the outer volumes Perseus Quadrant of the Outer Cassiopeia Sector, colonists captured by rogue AI to use as biotic matrix for the Zeon blight.

The Breakfast Crew

The Breakfast Crew is a SI:3+ intellect with multiple instantiations located in the N-Gamma Ivadi system with a large number of helper-instantiations of lower intellect.

They appear to be working solely on an artifact they have dubbed, "The Breakfast", apparently after an old advertising campaign whose tagline was, "Data - it's not just for breakfast anymore!"

The information is apparently stored in a highly encrypted form within the damaged hulk of what appears to be a jupiter brain node of a type previously unknown, although there are some slight (<5% correspondance) structural similarities with occasional diamond-belt AI jupiter nodes. Some of this information has allowed for the Breakfast Crew's hiring of linelayers from several systems as well as top-of-the-line empledokcetric shielding surrounding the Breakfast. No details of the decoding process has been known to have been released at this time, but large datavolumes are available at surprisingly low prices covering many topics of interest, including but not limited to scattered data on pre-nanoswarm Sol, the development of memetics, relatively early breakthroughs in nano- and pico-tech, etc. If the Breakfast contains information on so-called GodTech, the Crew is not saying.

Some sophonts have speculated that this node was damaged/abandoned during the version war, others that a subset of the being's other nodes ascended to a higher toposophic and accidentally or deliberately left behind this treasure trove. Others indicate that the Breakfast Crew are the real source of this information, but the fact of an unidentified object of approximately the correct mass was detected by the Argus Array approximately 350 years ago in the target system.

John B

breccia

a type of rock that is composed of rough, angular pieces of broken-up, older rocks cemented together. Impact craters produce breccia.

brecciated meteorite: A meteorite formed from cemented fragments of one or more meteorite types.

Bremermanns Limit

The maximum limit allowed for computation under the laws of physics

Bremermann's Limit derives from the Old Earth pre-singularity physics discoveries of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Einstein's principle of mass-energy equivalency. It is the maximum theoretical computational speed allowed by the laws of physics - 2E⁴⁷ bits per second per gram of computing substrate. Together with the Bekenstein Bound, which imposes a fundamental limit on information density, Bremermann's Limit represents the limits of physical computation, and the fundamental limit to how densely-packed and fast ultratech computronium nodes can be. Past a point, archailects and hyperfast high-toposophic civilizations can only grow physically larger, but not more densely-packed or faster per gram of computing substrate.

This is the reason why there are no proton-sized archailects (although myths and legends still persits, especilally among the less educated). Even so there are still picoscale intelligences with smaller amounts of processing power.

This doesn't prevent miniturisation in femtotech and hypofemtotech civilizations and archailects. A proton masses on the order of E^-24 grams. Thus even with the Bremermann Limit a proton-sized computronium node has a theoretical maximum processing density of E23 bps, 7 or 8 orders of magnitude greater than a baseline human brain, although in practice this is only attained with very advanced civilizations. Even so this allows a low to middle level transapient mind to be based on the mass of a nuclear particle.

Mike Parisi, Steve Bowers,

Brev

Artificial language designed to allow a baseline or near-baseline to communicate the maximum amount of information in the briefest amount of time.

Brev makes use of the entire range of word sounds that the baseline voice is capable of, not just those belonging to a particular language group. Mostly used by those hu who prefer to avoid using direct mind to mind communication links. The written version of the language employs graphic ideograms. Speakers of Brev brag that they can compress an entire life history into into 5 sentences or 3 lines of ideographs.

Brev was invented during the early Empires period by a splinter faction of the Refugium Federation, Ecos Ascending

The language is so compact that a speaker can repeat themself three times before a "slow-language" speakere can say the same thing once. This repetition allows the listener to pick up the patterns of the sentence/paragraph more easily. Sometimes - especially among the cyborg augmented clades, there's a sort of back and forth patter in each exchange like information packets being sent:

C: Mary had a little lamb :receipt?: D: Mhall :receipt.: C: Whose fleece was white as snow :receipt?: D: Wffwwas :receipt.: C: :incorrect receipt.: :correction: Whose fleece was white as snow :receipt?: D: Wfwwas :receipt.: etc.

Because of Brev's vulnerability to errors/noise, a lot of effort has been put into reducing or eliminating such problems as the language was developed. One simple method was to eliminate the use of words that sound the same but mean different things. (deer/dear, to/to/too are examples in Information age English). Speed of delivery would not be as much of a factor as tone, prefix and suffix placement and the use of words built around all the phonemes to clearly get a point across without using a lot of individual words to do so. Which is not to say that it would be impossible to be misunderstood, just harder and with a lot more information being misunderstood in one chunk.

Todd Drashner

Bribe expert

knows the 15 basic ways to profer a payment for semi- or illegal services, as well as most if not all of their fifteen factorial combinations.

Often an upload, ai, or alife, due to their flexibility of communication apparati. Mindworker profession.

John B

bright

a sentient of 0.3<S<0.4 toposophic. (hu baseline of IQ100 is S0.3)

The Daimon Broderick

one of a long line of heteredox Broderick Pozen daimons that had downloaded themselves into bioborg templates. Although all the SI:1 Brodericks are supposed to derive from a reconstructed uploaded early information age transhumanist and fabulist of that name, no authentic Broderick personas are known earlier than the late interplanetary period, altho the loss of records during the nanoswarm period means that some brodericks may indeed derive from the original baseline hu. On Taboris Orbital, New Robinson (MPA), there is an entire school of Historical Broderickology devoted to this and related matters.

M.Alan Kazlev

bronze age

Period in Old Earth human cultural and technological development, in which weapons and tools were made partly or chiefly of bronze (an alloy of copper and in easier to work with than iron)

Inanimate / Inorganic [Hylotech]	Organic / Carbon-based [Biotech]	data and Information transmission / Virtuality Infotech	psychotronics / psi / esotericism esotericism
Technology	pre-industrialised metallurgy	Agriculture, artificial selection	handwritten written manuscripts, wooden block-print	religion, occultism, mysticism, etc

brown dwarf

A massive object midway between gas giant and star; a starlike object too small to achieve nuclear reactions in its centre; any stellar object smaller than about 0.08 Sol masses

Brown dwarfs usually form in the same way as stars do, but, although like stars, do not become large enough for true nuclear fusion to occur. While some rotate around their primary like an ordinary planet, many more exist in the depths of interstellar space. Essentially a sort of huge gas-giant, brown dwarfs are heated by cpntraction, and radiate more energy than they absorb. The excess radiation to space can either be due to gravitational energy converted to thermal energy, or to a very low rate of fusion occurring in the centre of the brown dwarf. Although radiating in the infra-red, brown dwarfs are not very luminous. Average mass is between 10²⁸ kg and 84 x 10²⁸ kg. If it continues to cool down and contract, it may turn into a compact dark object that is not easily detected. Brown Dwarfs are an important source of raw materials, as they are easier to mine than stars.

brown noise

The sonic equivalent to Brownian Motion; a form of randomness that is the result of cumulatively adding white noise, to yield a random walk pattern. This is useful in formation of self-evolving subsentient and sentient soundscapes

brownian motion

the random movement of small particles suspended in liquid or gas. The motion is caused by unbalanced impacts of molecules on the particle. Some nanites use brownian motion as a power source.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

Old Earth Italian philosopher, poet, and priest who spread the ideas of Copernicus and also taught that there were an infinity of worlds in the universe, and that the stars were other suns. He was executed by the ecclesia of his time (the Catholic Church) for heresy.

Brushbot, brushvec

Fractal Vec with limited microscale (rarely nanoscale) manipulation abilities; a single unit usually configured like a double ended besom broom.

These robots are of similar intelligence to many human nearbaseline clades and are often well integrated into human society. (mostly NoCoZo, MPA, Cygexba Volumes.)

Steve Bowers

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