| 0 to 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Ss to St

The Sentients Socialistic Cybercracy

a.k.a. The Sentients' Polity a.k.a. the Dugans a.k.a. Megasov a.k.a. The Sovs

Prosperous Communistic-Utopian Polity located in Megasov Dyson, formerly Dugan's Star, nominal Negentropy Alliance

M. Alan Kazlev

Order of St. Christopher

Solarist starship religious order, founded in 5378 by Nos D388.

The members are all starships (mainly relativist crafts), serving the Divine Order by transporting beings, equipment and especially wormholes to where they are needed. During the Version War the ships of the order were involved in refugee transports, linelaying and scouting, their efforts gaining them a formal blessing of divine gratitude from H. H. the God Emperor. The order has since then largely been active in the Perseus rift and in the Amalgamation effort.

Anders Sandberg

St Xye

Negentropist culture and trade-port world, the main gateway for the Negentropy Alliance to the Utopia Sphere.

M. Alan Kazlev

standard damage waiver

those waivers approved and sealed by the Standard Damage Waiver Board.

They are normally what is meant by a 'damage waiver' and are distinguishable by their picotic seal.

The classic example is the standard damage waiver for 1 litre of fluid water in a single-use soft pressure vessel, which runs to approximately 5 quadrillion characters as translated into ancient earth English. This is easily understandable, as it covers all 'safe' uses for that quantity or some smaller amount of liquid water, including weapons-grade uses, heat dissipation, heat absorption, heat transfer, diffusion, solution, lubrication, ice production, biological uses, etc.

John B

Standard Damage Waiver Board

a service free for purchasers and users which coordinates (at a fee paid by the producers and/or safety corporation(s) involved) the 'standardization' of damage waivers across multiple competing products and producers.

It is one of the longest lasting boards of its type to have a single, unmodified charter - a record of 3,500+ terran years since its last modification. There have been many other such organizations in the past, some of which are still quoted as authoritative in the Periphery, but the only one currently active is the Standard Damage Waiver Board. Their picotic sealing is proof against many forms of forgery, and their legal grouping (composed of a multiple-instance transingular AI and many lower intellects) is quite active, constantly closing down forgers at a most impressive rate.

John B

Stanislaw

A bot-based "wild" mechosystem, comparable in diversity and complexity to a natural biologically based world. Possibly of xenosophont origin.

star

A large celestial body, usually wholly gaseous, massive enough to initiate (or to have once initiated) nuclear reactions in its central region.

Stars are classified in various ways, with these basic classifications going all the way back to late industrial and atomic age Old Earth. The Harvard system uses a temperature sequence based on spectral characteristics. The sequence is O B A, F G K M, with decimal subdivisions, so that G5 is half way between G0 and K0. The Morgan, Keenan, and Kellman system classifies stars by luminosity as well as temperature. They also gave numerical definitions of the Harvard spectral types and designated bright stars to be the standards. Another system assigned stars to two broad categories depending on composition, speed and location, as well as origin: Population I and Population II, with a rare Population III added. More advanced interplanetary age astronomy techniques and AI interest added further stellar taxonomies, many of which were inscrutable or seemingly irrelevant to baseline humans. Even today many of the old classifications are used by SI:<1 sophonts.

star lifting

Removing material from a star for industrial use or for stellar husbandry. Methods include increasing its rotation until material began to drift off the equator or squeezing it using intense magnetic fields from particle accelerators.

Graphic by Xaonon; text by Dave Criswell in Transhuman Terminology

Starbooster

Solar output enhancement array.

Consists of an array of solar sails placed in balanced positions above the northern and southern hemispheres of a star. The array reflects the output of the star back onto its surface, thereby heating the outer layers and causing the stars spectrum to shift upward. The result for planets and habitats orbiting in the plane of the ecliptic is that the star appears to change from its original classification (typically M or K) to a more Sol-like spectrum (G-class).

Todd Drashner

starburst

A relatively sudden and rapid episode of star formation in a galaxy, probably triggered in some cases by collision with another galaxy.

Starlight Gene Patch

The starlight gene patch is a genetic code that is used to prevent the psychological affects of low odd spectrum light.

The patch first reads the biont's genome and makes adjustments to the gene code to match the beings genetics and then releases it into the body via a nanite virus. Commonly given to new settlers to habitable worlds around Red Dwarfs and among those clades living in areas without natural light.

James Ramsey

Static/White Noise

information and interplanetary age music craze

The ultimate pre singularity triumph of music corp memetics, for years the corps financed hundreds of acts in hope of finding a single hit. Tired of this completely inefficient approach executives of the FNJ corporation approached the leading memetic engineers at the institute of advanced psychology on the new Israel habitat to develop an innovative solution to this problem.

Instead of concentrating on the tired approach of overmarketing an attractive but untalented starlet, they used the feelings of alienation amongst the adolescent population as the hook for the meme.

The initial music for testing this meme on the populace was random static noise, unfortunately for music lovers everywhere the meme's effectiveness was unparallelled.

From the mid 2050's to the early 2070's the most popular form of music in the 11-24 demographic was Static and its cousin White Noise. Music corps were delighted, never before did they have to do so little work to create a hit. Numerous bands were formed to exploit the meme including Active Noise Cancellation, Aliasing Filter and Bi-Linear Design.

The Static craze died out in the 2070's thanks to a counter-meme created by an independent memetic engineer and Elvis Presley fan Ryu O'Connor, despite numerous lawsuits on behalf of the entertainment megacorps, however was revived by an interview with the AI Kilburn in 2105 in which e listed er favourite music:

InterviewBot: So Kilburn what tunes do you crunch numbers to?

Kilburn: Well I'm quite a fan of last centuries rock bands, U2, They Might Be Giants, Bowie and Tom Waits not to mention classics such as Bach's Toccata and Fugue. More recent, well I enjoy looking for patterns in Aliasing Filter's last MP9 "Random Electrical Discharges". Nothing too radical...

The AI movement hysteria was enough to kickstart the meme again, and for much of the interplanetary period static was enjoyed today by post SI:1 sapients, alienated adolescents and AI cults.

Ben Higginbottom

$Category: Maths$ Statistics

Field of mathematics dealing with evaluating sampled data to find mathematical or other patterns. Includes probability theory, the application of statistical methods for performing studies of complex systems, and sampling techniques for measuring specific information. Has many applications including white noise aesthetics, random walk simms, economics, materials studies, medicine, psychology, sociology, market research, anakalyptics, and cliology.

M. Alan Kazlev

Stasist

One of two basic AI camps that emerged during the information age. In contrast to the progressives the Stasists wanted to halt all other technological innovation, so that they can safely rule over the baselines like gods.

stasists are divided into pro-human farmers, human-neutral centralists, and anti-human skynets.

During the early years, the stasists were busy building empires, but ran into each other all the time. There were simply too many AIs and too many unrelated plans going on in the Solar System. Repeated attempts to create an "AI Government" failed, because the various AIs were too diverse. The stasists gradually reached a consensus, but only after marginalizing the skynets with their incompatible plans. This centralist consensus began to work on creating an inner system dominated by megacorps and governments.

Anders Sandberg

steamecha

steam-powered armoured bipedal dreadnoughts popular among extreme hobbyists and steampunkers in the NoCoZo and elsewhere.

Steamecha are characterized by a surreal mix and of advanced material research and holographic displays and astonishingly primitive fire-control / targeting systems and baroque steam-powered engine.

The popularity lies in the fact that steam is dangerous stuff for baselines to be playing around in. Sure the AI running the park could patch you up after your mech took a hit and you got par broiled over 130% of your body (lungs and digestive tract also), but %@#^ that hurt! Some steampunkers use a chemical known as "cool steam" that expands and contracts dramatically at cooler temperatures, but these are looked down at by the purists

And some steam-mech aficionados trick out their mechs for "authentic" sound: The more of a metallic screech you can get out of the joints and the more clanking the mech makes as it moves, the better. Trying to get it looking and sounding just like the Prylor-Gamma-Gamma mechs of '09 (local Calender), there are good records of the way they were in the old days and some mechanics work for hours to make the actuator joint for their Scorn Cannon to get just the right pitch.

Peter Kisner with some notes by M. Alan Kazlev

steampunk, steampunker

Baseline subculture popular in the the NoCoZo and MPA. Steampunkers try to cultivate elaborate steam-powered retro cultures, often using baroque and baseline-dangerous weaponry and machinery, and combining this with advanced uploading and biocloning technology to ensure their revival in the (likely) case of extreme injury or death

M. Alan Kazlev

Steelcliff

the first alien BGC system, discovered in 7852

Steelcliff is an isolated world towards galactic anti-spinward in what is now the Negentropy Alliance Outer Volumes. It appears to be running some kind of virch world, and certainly has sufficient computing resources to run at least millions of entities. It seems to have been put into place some forty million years ago, but as yet no attempt has been made to contact who or whatever may exist inside it.

Tony Jones

The Stellar Umma

stellar engineering

Modifying or customizing a star in any manner. Could be for the purposes of stellar husbandry, or for more exotic purposes.

stellar husbandry

A type of stellar engineering which involves controlling the evolution and properties of stars, especially to stabilize them, prolong their lifetimes, manipulate the stellar wind, lift off useful material or create new stars. Typical methods include star lifting or mixing the stellar core with envelope material to make hydrogen burning last longer.

Dave Criswell, in Transhuman Terminology

Stellar Magnitude

The "brightness" of a star, expressed on a logarithmic scale, so that brighter stars have smaller magnitude values.

Thus a first magnitude star is very bright, a sixth magnitude star is at the limit of normal baseline hu vision.
see also Apparent Magnitude, Absolute Magnitude

Chris Clowes

stellar wind

Continual (as opposed to episodic) emission of particles from stars.

All stars exhibit some kind of stellar wind. A Sol-type yellow dwarf star loses about 10^-14 M_sol per metric year from winds blowing between 200 to 300 km s^-1 from the quiet solar surface and 700 km s^-1 from coronal holes. Cool luminous stars such as red giants have lower wind velocities of around 20 to 60 km s^-1, although the larger diameters mean that mass losses are higher; in the order of 10^-8 M_sol to 10^-5 M_sol per year. Stellar winds are harnessed by solar sailing vessels, in-system cloudharvesters, and other low energy phyles and clades, as well as by some megastructure-based ISOs

Chris Clowes

Stevens, House

steward, stewardship

Managing an environment as a precious resource.

Stewards are the opposite to extropians who want to let an evolution-like process change it (it should be noted that the term extropian used in this definition doesn't necessarily cover all people calling themselves extropians). The stewards and extropians represent divergent philosophies of change: stewards think about what is already there, while extropians think about how things can or will evolve. This is a polarity that goes back to the first hyperturings and beyond that to atomic and information age humanity. Among the archailect empires, the Caretaker Gods and Negentropy Alliance represent the principle of stewardship, whilst Keter, and the Technorapture Hypernation correspond to the extropian pole.

modified from Jaron Lanier, in Transhuman Terminology

Stig Ranes

Legendary martyr of the planet Hibra in the Crucis Corridor (7485-7520)

Stiltwalker

large tetrapodal terrestrial herbivore indigenous to the savannas of the northern continent of Calinder's World (Lacustric Subtype - Cygexba middle region, near the Zoeific Biopolity border - Eden Institute Scientific Reserve).

Stiltwalkers have a squat sausage-like body with leathery hide, and move by means of two pairs of long but stout jointed chitinous stilts. There are also two pairs of smaller legs that rarely play a part in locomotion. Whilst there are a two rows of eye spots along the back, but smell and hearing are the primary senses (including a sort of long-range sonar). Feeding is via a jointed "mask" at the end of a long muscular proboscis, this bears arrays of radula and is scraped across vegetation. The mashed plant material is then taken up and stored in one of the several stomachs, where it is broken down over several days by symbiotic micro-organisms.

Stiltwalkers have an ungainly stride, not unlike a terragen giraffe, and have been clocked at over 65 km/h in full gallop. In intelligence and in their herding behaviour they are broadly comparable to a terragen ungulate. There are some half a dozen species, the largest, the Great Stiltwalker, attaining a height of 5 meters, a body length of 3.5 meters and a weight of almost a tonne. More common is the Savannah Stiltwalker, which is a little smaller - height when legs extended about 3.5 meters, body length 2.5 meters, adult weight about 250 - 350 kg

The wetter, more forested southern continent bears a distant relative, the stiltworm. This is somewhat smaller, has four pairs of much shorter legs, and a lower more elongate body. It is thought that the two groups diverged from a common 8-legged ancestor during the Paludian Period (in the local geological time span); the northern Stiltwalkers becoming taller shorter and losing the front and rear pairs of legs (there is an interesting series of fossil forms here, including squat six-legged stiltwalkers and taller forms with two pairs of vestigial stiltlegs adapted to grasping vegetation); while the southern forms became more elongate as the local climate became wetter and the prairies gave way to rainforests

M. Alan Kazlev

Stivers, The

Early Federation age hacker and Cyberian culture hero.

In traditional accounts, The Stivers was a humble baseline with no specialist education other than what he had acquired himself, and only minimal implants. Even so, he was a revolutionary coder, creating several specialist corporate programs, and a number of expert system and search programming languages still used by some clades and hyperturings today. Hence the saying "Even a baseline can program like an SI:1 - if e is Stivers!" and "E codes in an elegant, stiverian way."

However, cliological research, and study of some recently unearthed Federation records, shows that most of the mystique was developed later. The Stivers was indeed an exceptional coder, but he came from a long family of hackers and had several quite radical nootropic and wetware augments. Today there are still a number of Cyberian sects that worship Stivers as exemplar

Donna Malcolm Hirsekorn and M. Alan Kazlev

Stochocracy

Form of government very popular in medium-tech clades and polities that are of a decidedly libertine bent. In a stochocracy, the number of government positions is kept to an absolute bare minimum needed to ensure that all the necessary functions of government are fulfilled without anyone being overworked.

stone age technology

Inanimate / Inorganic [Hylotech]	Organic / Carbon-based [Biotech]	data and Information transmission / Virtuality Infotech
Stone and wood (natural materials)	some domestic animals and crops	speech, oral history only

Straight Arrow

Former headquarters of the Sagittarius Sphere

$Category: Math$ Strange Attractor

An attractor of a dynamical system that is usually fractal in dimension and is indicative of chaos

from glossary definition by Gary William Flake

strange matter production

production of matter with an excess of strange quarks.

Strange matter has a variety of properties including the ability to convert more matter into strange matter under conditions of high pressure such as found at the centre of a star or neutron star. Under certain conditions this might release huge amounts of energy. Massive starquakes or explosions on neutron stars may sometimes be due to strange matter.

Todd Drashner

Strange Matter Viri, Strangelets

Picotech weapons based strange matter

One of the nastier picotech weapons is strange matter viruses. Strange matter consists of a mixture of up, down and strange quarks that catalyse the conversion of ordinary matter into strange matter. By dumping strangelets into a planet or star it can be converted into strange matter, resulting in total destruction and supernova-like explosions. Since this tends to spread more strangelets, the weapon can thoroughly make a whole region of space uninhabitable. The most well known use of strange matter was the destruction of the Soft Cathedrals by the Sagittarius Sphere in 6521, which cost an estimated 32 billion entities their lives and destroyed over 126 solar systems. Even by the standards of the Version War it was considered an atrocity

The only way of dealing with it is picotech or femtotech immune systems, devices able to dissolve strangelets. These are at present not widely available or have to be leased from the AIs at exorbitant prices. However, there appear to exist strange matter predators, the near-mythical polemovores ("war-eaters"). They were first theoretically postulated to explain the fact that ancient conflicts by advanced aliens had not led to the gradual conversion of the galaxy into strangelets. They were actually discovered 8151 by an expedition from the Centa Aly department of strategic research into the M4 nebula, where it was known there existed strange stars. They discovered immense traceries of aligned nuclear matter, apparently feeding on free strangelets and breeding on strange star surfaces, something that insulated them from spreading more strange matter. They were most likely deliberately designed by some alien civilization. Attempts to introduce them into strangelet-infested systems have been quite successful, but the cost of moving the extremely diffuse and heavy traceries have proven prohibitive to anyone but the most threatened

Anders Sandberg

Stratocracy

Rule by a nation's military leaders, or the military leaders of a clan or clade. In the aftermath of the Version Wars a number of military commanders, isolated from the main government in relativistic fleets, set up this kind of government in many of the worlds of the outer volumes. Generally these regimes are short-lived.

stromatolite

stromatolites on Laetona Colonial aquatic, littoral, or semi-aquatic prokaryote or prokaryotoid, prokaryote-equivalant life form, the most common form of macroscopic life in the galaxy. The terragen version were colonies of blue-green algae that appeared along shorelines and in shallow water; most abundant from about 3.5 to 2 billion years ago. Stromatolites do best in water-rich temperate to warm low-diversity carbon-based ecosystems such as are common in Eovenusian, Eogaian, and Eoarean type planets.

Right, the Stromatolites of the eoarean world Laetona (outer Cygexba Volume)

M. Alan Kazlev

strong convergence hypothesis

The postulate that all sufficiently advanced cultures converge towards the same state. A rival hypothesis is the divergent track hypothesis.

Nick Bostrom in Transhuman Terminology

Strong Nuclear Force

One of the four fundamental forces. It is transmitted by the gluon, which transmits colour charge between quarks. Since the gluon is both massless and interacts with itself, the force does not fall off over distance and is very strong compared to the other forces. Many pico- and femtotech devices are based on strong force manipulations, especially stabilized neutronium.

Anders Sandberg

$Category: Mathematics$ Structic

Generalization of mathematics to encompass indeterminate structures.

Anders Sandberg

Stupidity Filters

A variant on the SpamShield used by those with augmented/replaced senses.

It automatically tunes out meaningless drivel and enhances the information flow perceived. Anything the user defines as 'stupid' is de-prioritized in the perception. It still can be focused on, but it isn't as eye-catching. Very useful to avoid those sexually-suggestive re-meming madverts. .

John B

| 0 to 9 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Unless otherwise specified,
this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

feedback