Something that interests me about the ongoing march of technology is the way new gizmos tend to reflect the design of similar gizmos on the Sci-Fi movies and TV shows of yesteryear. The canonical example is probably the way those cell-phones that flip open look like obvious analogues to the old communicators on Star Trek (before the design was refined to a breast-badge that you thwack when you want to talk to someone — I always wanted to see a new Starfleet recruit with “directional issues” habitually whack the wrong breast, but I digress).
Anyway, remember how on the alien spaceships and in their command centers in all those movies and shows, instead of display screens, they always gleaned large amounts of information from either screens or globes that displayed nothing but swirling colors? Well, behold the ambient orb, a frosted-glass globe that you can configure to shift color depending on the data you want, er, “colorized”.
Feel free to use this post’s comments to make jokes about what George W. Bush would do with such a gizmo in the Oval Office!