Each Segues column starts with something tech-related before quickly branching out from there into a tangentially related thread. These articles are born from my thought and speech patterns that regularly contain quickfire transitions. For one of my birthdays, a friend made me a crown that said “King of the Segues”. Actually, it said “King of the Segways” and that was the day we learned how to spell segue correctly.
Jokes about positronic brains and Legion flight rings aside (two geek references in one shot!) the future is here. It may be disguised in the veil of our every everyday lives, but we are indeed living in the future that fills more science fiction books, movies, and comic books than is possible to load onto your 250GB ARCHOS tablet. The ridiculously fast pace of tablet advancement isn’t the only easily recognizable sign that we indeed live in future times. Other signs are more subtle, because they naturally affect our everyday behaviors with each other. When technology begins to affect etiquette, you know we’re steadily encroaching into new territory.
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As long as no one tries to Skype video chat with me while on the toilet, I’m generally okay with people texting me from the bathroom. I’m not the only one either. In a study by Harris Interactive, sponsored by the Intel Corporation, a whopping 75 percent of 2,625 adults ages 18 and older think it’s okay to use internet-enabled gadgets in the bathroom. That doesn’t go just for phones, because it also includes laptops, netbooks, and likely tablets too. The logistics of and reasoning for using those other devices in the bathroom escapes me. I can’t imagine any situation where I’d feel so compelled to watch a video or edit a document on my non-phone device that it couldn’t wait until I’d taken care of whatever business I needed to do in the bathroom first. While I’m highly against talking on the phone while in the bathroom (don’t be the guy next to me at the urinal yakking away on a Bluetooth headset), I’ll also admit I’ve laid down my share of triple-word scores on Words with Friends from the lavatory. These modern-day manners modifications can touch upon how disgusting the quickly realized future now may be, but it can also be quite damn scary, with a true mix of ethereal beauty thrown in.
In mid-June, the European aerospace company Airbus announced plans to have a transparent plane in use by the year 2050. Now, this isn’t a prototype for Wonder Woman’s jet, but actual designs for a fully-functional plane with a see-through roof and walls. In a video that would feel at home in a movie based on a Roald Dahl book or in a Bryan Fuller TV show, Airbus discusses what they consider to be the future of travel. Along with plants that grow into airplane seats and self-repairing planes is a section on using new materials to create a chameleon-like skin on future planes that enables the top half to become transparent. 
“The idea is to have a technology for the fuselage that’s a bit like bones of birds that allows to have large spaces that can turn transparent at the palm of your hand in order to look outside and ‘live’ the panorama in which you are flying,” Charles Champion, Airbus’s head of engineering, told London’s Telegraph.
Every seat would become a window seat. For those with aerophobia, the very idea of such a plane has probably already made them break out in hives and go searching for tiny bottles of alcohol. Watch the rest of the videos at the Airbus website, because even if the transparent plane may not come to fruition tomorrow, the overall ideas seem far-reaching and fantastical. Not everyone is flinging us into the future to see the stars more clearly though. Some people, in the name of safety, are championing the idea of making our future more like our present or even our past.
The National Federation of the Blind helped push through the Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act, which seeks to protect the blind and other pedestrians from injury as a result of silent vehicle technology. Electric and hybrid vehicles have been called a danger to those who mainly have to judge traffic by hearing it because of the inherent quiet nature of the vehicles. The Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act requires these whisper-silent vehicles to add some sort of audible noise so they can be easily heard by those around them. Ford is already jumping to fill this sound void by asking people on Facebook what noise they want most to go with the 2012 Ford Focus Electric (someone needs to teach Ford’s social media people how to create a Facebook poll). Nobody wants to see a blind person get run over by a car, but it’s interesting that one of the features electric and hybrid vehicles have been lauded for is now under fire for its potentially bloody real-world ramifications.
So, while we may not quite have flying cars or teleportation yet, the future is arriving so quickly that it’s hard to differentiate what’s ahead with what’s now. The future is here and it kind of grosses me out sometimes.
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