2 : 00 A.M.
le tarte

I read a short Philip K. Dick story in which science fiction writers of today are actually latent precogntives, and scientists of the future send a team back to retrieve one Poul Anderson, who holds the key to the problem of lightspeed travel. The story was fun to read because I got to see an author drop a bunch of names of his peers, authors who he perhaps felt were talented enough to potentially be telling the future. It made me want to retrieve stories by each of the authors mentioned, but this is not yet possible with paper media. Not in a neat, hypertexty way, anyhow. Something that set off a weak bell in my head in the story is that Poul Anderson's daughter was named Astrid Anderson. Know who else is named that? Yup. Eve Astrid Anderson (who is (pretty much) out of college by now) Coincidence? I DON'T THINK SO. Oh wait, yes I do. Coincidence, probably.

Wow, it's dark in here. Know what the problem with learning how to type is? As soon as you do, someone will hand you a teeny tiny laptop with the keyboard rearranged to fit on its graham cracker sized work surface. Or rather, as soon as you do, they'll take away your steeply inclined mechanical typewriter and hand you some kind of Brother electromatic thing which rattles like an angry hippo-rattlesnake crossbreed and hits the page so hard that little lowercase shaped flecks of ribbon spray out of the cavity with the hammers in it and get all over your glasses until it looks like you're being attacked by a box of alphabits. Much later, someone will tell you that dvorak is much faster, and you'll get a dvorak keyboard and spend the rest of the week typing at two WPM, constantly lifting up your hands to see where dvorak hid the letter "f".

10 years from then, you'll try to assemble a "wearable" computer which is mostly concealed within the folds of either a billowy tommy hilfiger space vest or a grey "members only" epaulet jacket, with one pocket stuffed full of an input device called "the twiddler". The twiddler's fatal flaw will turn out to be a radically anti-ergonomic design which requires you to have fingertips protruding from your first knuckles. Wearable computers and personal area data networks will have a few more false starts, and then someone will convincingly solve the natural language problem, everything will be voice controlled, and your typing skills (by now adapted to flexible twiddly dvorak keysheets) will be completely obsolete.