Today's Muse:
Now this, this is cool. Another step closer to the future. This concept phone - is phone really what one would call it? It's a phone, yes, but it's also a camera, game platform, PDA... Any of these things with just a touch. And check the "floating" interface - a better use of it than the floating text gag with the present models. One small step...

Of course, when I look at this, I remember the phone trait in Transmetropolitan -

"Grows an antenna over your skeleton. Runs off your own metabolism... Interface: Menu over your left eye, imaginary keypad right eye/right hand."

I hope I live long enough to see it.

I've always wanted to be able to take pictures with my eye. You know, blink and voila! Photo snapped, of whatever you were looking at. No more fiddling with cameras; which never quite seems to capture the scene the way you want it anyway. I remember trying to describe it for a "Your Invention!" primary school project thing - I remember been told to be more "creative".

But isn't necessity the mother of invention? Or desire the mother of necessity, if you want to go down that road. The point is, I wanted a camera I could manipulate easily, without trembling hands ruining the shot or lighting making everything look either too naked or too shadowed... I wanted to save pictures of the things I saw, with my own eye.

When you're working on a story, or a picture, or whatnot - Haven't you wished that what you were putting down on paper was what you had in your head? It's perfect in your mind. It's just the way you want it. But, somehow, along the way of transferring that thought from your brain and along your arm (Or foot, whatever) and onto paper, something gets lost. What's on that piece of paper isn't quite what was in your mind's eye. You can work on it until it's the closest approximation possible to what's in your head, but it will never be it. Sooner or later you have to teach yourself to be satisfied with this approximation.

The solution, my eleven year-old headmeats decided, was a device whereby one might bypass the writing and the endless scrawling, and immediately produce the finished work. In my head this glorious machine was a lot like your head plugged to a computer screen, upon which you could view your work and refine it as you saw fit, and then printed on the mother of all printers. (This was 1999, mind you. Eleven year-old headmeats are easily influenced. And gladly too, I might add.)

Of course, with such a machine, people would have to learn to isolate thoughts; instead of jumping from subject to subject like a monkey. To focus.

Neat.

Just one thing.

Stuff in your head is perfect, beacause of the vagueries. You know what you're trying to say, and the concept in your mind is linked to a dozen other sensations or thought processes. When you attempt to translate that onto paper, you don't have that instant connection, that... background story. You have to find a way to make the stuff on paper communicate what's in your head, without the benefit of all the links... And I'm going in circles.

Back to the first point: Science is neat.

The whole phone trait and eye-camera thing: Modifying one's body. Changing it into the image of perfection. That's what it is, isn't it? Plastic surgery, gender-reassignment procedures, lasik. The option to refine? improve? the human body. I know some people are disgusted by the idea of the phone trait - in the same way some are squicked by the idea of using a pig's heart in a transplant? Something foreign inside the "natural" body.

If it comes to pass, it will be accepted by some, rejected by others. Naturally. I keep thinking about the digital watch implanted underneath the skin, the numbers glowing through the skin, for some reason. I also keep thinking about how Roald Dahl kept his hipbone on his writing desk after the doctors replaced it with a metal one. I'd like a hipbone on my desk.