Expect to see a lot of smugly satisfied English literature professors and students on a campus near you after the holiday season, once they hear the news that there is scientific evidence to support the notion that reading Shakespeare is a stimulating intellectual exercise for your brain.

Maybe I can’t tape bacon to cats or write successful science fiction novels, but at least there’s one way I’ve managed to copy John Scalzi – by interviewing Karl Schroeder. So if you’d like to read Schroeder discussing his writing, foresight consultancy and the demise of futurist gurus, the future of the publishing industry, and why he thinks the technological singularity is bunk, please step this way.

It’s a little hard to get much substantial from the press release, but it appears that the University of Cambridge and Alps Electronics are developing tiny LCD projectors that use holography to project sharp, bright pictures. [digg]

Acoustic sensors could turn your entire desk (or just about any surface) into a touchpad. You could have a lot of fun imagining the applications: the linked article mentions a globe that sends geographic data to an attached screen based on what you touch. [slashdot]