May 2013

He looked sort of like Michael Caine but was taller and more gaunt.
The dream began with a climactic scene where the tall man somehow duplicated himself and skinned the head of the clone, peeling back flesh from the bone of the skull. This was at night on the side of a road, possibly in or near a cemetery.
Both the tall man and the clone continued to live, in various guises and states of connection between themselves and others.
In one vignette, the tall man, still on that roadside, sat and talked to a young hitchhiker or itinerant. The tall man lectured or proselytized but wasn't communicating to the hitchhiker directly. Instead his speech was transmitted by means of a long rectangular plank of wood, painted like a native totem-object with a checkerboard of solid colors. The individual squares morphed from one shade to another in liquid, wave-like movements. The hitchhiker had no difficulty understanding this visual speech.
Later the tall man had a confrontation with another tall man on a train. This was not the clone, this was a rival tall man who began hectoring "our" tall man from a seat at the rear of the train car. Our tall man got up and walked to the back of the train, arguing with his rival as he approached him.
It was a political argument involving revolution. It seems our tall man is mixed up in politics or is some kind of messiah-figure.
In another scene our tall man was apprehended by the authorities and taken on a plane to a place of interrogation. All the passengers were being strapped into the reclining airplane seats with harnesses around their necks. Just as an attendant was attaching the tall man's harness, a shot was fired and the attendant slumped dead over the tall man. A group of revolutionaries took the tall man off the plane and ran up a steep hill, firing machine guns behind them as they climbed. The point of view was the tall man's as he strained with the physical exertion of the climb.
They reached the top of a mountain (in the desert) and then everyone ran down the other side to the safety of a vast, unpopulated wilderness.

Newt Gingrich meets the smartphone

Lauren Weinstein annotates a particularly boneheaded speech where Newt ponders what to call this new computer-in-a-cellphone thingy.

Gingrich may not know what to call it but he has no qualms about suggesting it's an all-in-one device that could alter the way you live, work, and shop.
For any serious detailed work, though, whether it's art, music, video editing or spreadsheets, the "pros" are going to continue to use a large screen (or two), a keyboard, and a mouse (or stylus/tablet), supplemented with a phone for traveling around. This idea that your whole life is going to happen in a phone is a consumer fantasy being sold to the rubes.
It's not inconceivable that ten years from now every workplace will be re-tooled so that a new stockbroker, travel agent, bank employee, etc will be handed a phone or pad on the first day of work and shown to a cubicle half the size of present ones, to go quietly mad in eyestrain hell. Or that the same employees will "work from home" using these devices and go quietly mad there. Downsizing equipment would certainly benefit the ownership class and it's possible the present phone-for-everything bandwagon is taking us to this future. More likely big hardware will stick around longer than this time frame, however.