Neem: Cognitive Drug

Neem is a mnemonic drug that works by “tagging” experiences and mental input with a set of unique sensations that contribute to the formation of state-based memories. Neem gummy chews come in a variety of fruit avors shaped like extinct old Earth animals. Neem gives characters a 20 bonus on COG Tests to recall information they learned while on Neem (see Memorizing and Remembering, p. 176). The drawback to Neem is that memories they accumulate while under the drug’s in uence have no em...

 An Early Passage on Taxonomy

NATURE, by descending gradually from great to small, from strong to weak, coun|terbalances every part of her works. Attentive solely to the preservation of each species, she creates a profusion of individuals, and supports by numbers the small and the feeble, whom she hath left unprovided with arms or with courage. She has not only put those inferior animals in a condition to perpetuate and to resist by their own numbers, but she seems, at the same time, to have afforded a supply to each by m...

 Ontologies vs. Folksonomies

It is argued - though currently the arguments are filtering only slowly into the academic literature - that folksonomies are preferable to the use of controlled, centralised ontologies [e.g. 259]. Annotating Web pages using controlled vocabularies will improve the chances of one's page turning up on the 'right' Web searches, but on the other hand the large heterogeneous user base of the Web is unlikely to contain many people (or organisations) willing to adopt or maintain a complex ontology. ...