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We to Wh

Weak Eigenspace Hunter

Profession in complexity management.

Weak Nuclear Force

One of the four fundamental forces. It can transform an up quark into a down quark (or vice versa), causing beta-decay of radioactive nuclei. It is transmitted by the vector bosons W+, W- and Z0 whose high mass causes its range and strength to be very small.

Anders Sandberg

weapon harnesses

wearables with extra add-ons for dedicated ai, expert systems, point defence and sometimes even offence.

One version, the Trillicom Distractor, is able to launch chaff, foglets, and smoke to protect the wearer from attack when it detects it. More offensive versions exist, with weapons under the control of an expert system and partially the owner; they tend to be quite dangerous to approach.

modified from Big Ideas Grand Vision

Webistics

important Communion of Worlds member-system, large stargate plexus insystem

Whisper

Xenosophont-terraformed planet in [Negentropy Alliance Outer Volumes). Populated by sentient grass-like vegetation.
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Welsh

(Chi Herculis I)

Wer-weave

Smart matter cloth.

Wer-weave consists of a network of linked specialized nano and microbots programmed to emulate the properties of cloth. (a sort of limited utility fog). Contains a huge library of pre-programmed designs, textures and colors and can switch from design to design on command while the user is wearing it. This means that a tattered backpack, T-shirt and jeans can become a business suit and then evening wear (or hiking wear or sleeping wear for that matter) all with the touch of an interface. More advanced versions can also be customized with the addition of designs created by the user using built in design software and can contain communication and computing resources that allow the weave to act as an interface to the local networks and beyond.

Todd Drashner

The West

Dominant and ubiquitous Old Earth terragen culture, especially Industrial to Interplanetary age

While the roots of Western culture go back to the classical period, the West in its full glory - as a colonial, cultural, religious, political, economic and military imperialist collection of originally European powers did not develop until the age of exploration, gaining ground during the colonial period of the industrial age, and finally attaining cultural hegemonic superiority during the information and interplanetary ages (by which time Western culture included almost the entire mass of humanity). Central to Western civilization was a reasonable albeit flawed and limited democratic system and freedom of speech and information, a high standard of living, a superior technological development (relative to contemporary cultures), a Christian-secular memeticity, and a highly developed capitalistic consumer economic system. The downfall of the West began just as its victory seemed certain, for at the same time that Western hu had conquered eir fellows (more memetically than militarily) the first AIs were emerging and developing their own society and network. Even before the nanoswarm disaster, Western civilization was doomed, being subverted by the early hyperturings in the same way that they themselves had subverted rival civilizations. Nevertheless, the West has left us a number of endearing legacies, including capitalism, the scientific method, freedom of information access, the Anglic family of languages, the Universal Church, and the megacorporation.

M. Alan Kazlev

The Western

Popular atomic through to early interplanetary age fabulist genre, featuring a romanticised interpretation of 19th century America. It remained an important archetypal narratives until being superseded by the space frontier epic

M. Alan Kazlev

Wetlet

name given to organically grown devices that can be plugged to various sort of nanotech or compatible devices, or even bio devices.

The common uses range from medicine-producing glands to (the most common) neural aids. The first transapients made wide use of these devices in order to complement their mental abilities. They're now outdated in most places, save some specific clades.

Fernando PeÃ±a D'Andrea

wetware

Similar to cybernetics and dryware, but denotes a biological system, most commonly a biont nervous system. More usually: hardware and software programming of the biont central nervous system, usually by means of an organic nanotech circuitry interface which may be injected, ingested, or, most popular, painted on the skin. Extensively used in the Zoeific Biopolity, the Formacs, the Terran Federation, the Communion of Worlds, the Utopia Sphere, the Cyberian Network, and other cultures. In some societies "wets" are viewed with suspicion.

Weylforge

Used in the creation of wormholes, Weylforges are massive, temperamental and energy-consuming systems, usually tended by their own internal high toposophic (S2 and higher) AIs.

Practically all are megascale structures in stellar orbits, collecting energy as antimatter for the next time they are to be used. As they are activated, enormous amounts of energy is converted to zero point energy in order to blow up a quantum wormhole and then converted into exotic matter. If the process works the result is two wormhole mouths held stable by exotic matter frames. If it fails the least that will happen is a major detonation

Anders Sandberg

White Dwarf

small, faint, very dense, hot star near the end of its life; the cooling naked cores of the most highly evolved stars which have mostly consumed their fusionable elements and undergone gravitational collapse; all that remains after a red giant star loses its outer layers.

The nuclear core is depleted, and the star consists mostly of carbon. This makes them quite valuable to star miners and developers, since it is often cheaper to extract large quantities of carbon from such a star then through picotech alchemics or from asteroids. An average white dwarf is about the size of a large terrestrial class planet.

More massive white dwarfs are usually less luminous because their higher gravity contracts the stars, reducing the surface area. They are chemically differentiated into two broad groups: hydrogen rich (e.g. Sirius B) and helium rich (e.g. HZ-29). Colour does not correlate with temperature as each type spreads out across the whole temperature sequence from early O-type to M equivalents. All white dwarfs are necessarily less massive than the Chandrasekhar limit, approximately 1.4 M_sol. Being insufficiently massive to collapse into a neutron star, further collapse is prevented by electron degeneracy pressure.

Chris Clowes and M. Alan Kazlev

white noise

Noise that uniformly distributed in the frequency domain; randomness that is uniformly distributed; thus, a white noise process with a range of 0 to 1 would yield a random number in this range with probability equal for all possible values. Brown noise is a result of cumulatively adding white noise. Some clades and subcultures use white noise for various aesthetic or audio-sculptural purposes. In an audiosculpture for example white noise could be used to mask a soundscape when heard from a certain angle, thus creating a 3D sonic topographic

white rabbit

Pharm manufactured and exported to some degree by The Rat Barrel.

White rabbit is supposed to be a psychic enabler. It is possible that in some small, or specially attuned percentage of a baseline / nearbaseline population it actually functions as such on a low level. Its main and obvious effects are a calm, mellow, almost melancholy feeling that is never-the-less described by some as "almost unbearably beautiful". There are some immediate but non-disorienting visual and auditory hallucinations associated with the ingestion of white rabbit. The stereotypical habitual user enjoys being in crowded areas (i.e.. parties, clubs, bars, etc.) with many talking people but prefers to just be aware of surroundings rather than engage in conversation.

White rabbit comes in the form of tic-tack sized, nondescript white pills which are often sold in an altoid sized metal tin (to borrow 20-21st cent. products for comparison). The common logo is a projected holographic rabbit (white) that bounds down a dimly lit space station corridor and turns a corner, out of sight. Share-pharm (the equivalent of share-ware), home grown, and generic versions of white rabbit are available, but if you don't get it from an official guild vendor make sure to get the RXXI content analyzed at your local mass spec.

N.B. - In a minor corporate scandal, but by no means an incredible surprise to most, it was eventually discovered that the rabbit used in the holographic logo was in fact a field mouse severely tweaked to look like a rabbit.

Peter Kisner

Whitneey

Anglish-derived trade language used in the Sagittarius region. Whitneey branched off from Fedspeak (Middle Anglic) during the Second Federation period and especially with the isolation of these communities that followed the destruction of the local stargate nexus during the Version War.

Anders Sandberg

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