The Culture: Difference between revisions

*** To briefly elaborate, a Mind can perform its day to day functions with a minuscule amount of its processing power. The rest of it can be used to mentally simulate 12-dimensional universes inside their own "heads". The only problem is that it can become very addictive.

* [[Did Not Do the Research]]: The basic "nonary alphabet" of the Culture is described (in ''Excession'') as being composed of 9-bit characters which display as a 3x3 grid. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how computers work and is incredibly wasteful. Either all Culture citizens memorize the bit-patterns of their entire 512 character alphabet (unlikely) or they have an alphabet made of crude-looking, single-case characters that takes up a tiny portion of the available 9 bits. A 3x3 grid really limits the appearance of the characters that make up an alphabet. The scheme used by every computer system ever invented by real-world humans is to represent characters as an arbitrary binary sequence (for example, the letter "a" is a byte with the numeric value 0x61) and to delegate display of that information to document rendering programs (the appearance of the letter "a" on your screen is determined by the program that reads 0x61 and decides what a lower case "a" looks like- this decision making process consumes far more than the 8 bit that make up the letter in a document, but you only have to do it once to display every "a" in every document).

* [[Do-Anything Robot]]: Drones, thanks to their forcefields.

* [[Does This Remind You of Anything?]]: A leader in ''Use of Weapons'' is guilty of rounding up unpopular ethnic minorities and sending them away on trains, supposedly for [[Released to Elsewhere|resettlement elsewhere]], but they are never seen again, a reference to [[Nazi Germany]] . [[Bilingual Bonus]]; he has the title "Ethnarch," which means ''leader of a race.'' Very much the kind of title a Hitler [[Expy]] would award himself.