Pop Culture

I still remember the first time Clippy popped up on my screen. There I was in early 1997, a few years into my IT career, wearing my cheap suit and gaudy tie as young office techies had to do back then, writing documentation for some consulting project. In the middle of all this arbitrary workplace formality, a cartoon paperclip suddenly materialized on my screen like some kind of malware attack, complete with those unmistakable eyebrows, asking if I needed help writing a letter. There was nothing like it at the time—it was simultaneously curious and deeply unsettling. My immediate reaction? “Get lost, paperclip.” ...

I remember watching A New Hope as a kid and thinking those towering moisture vaporators on the Lars farm looked pretty cool, but also wondering how they actually worked. Pulling water straight out of desert air seemed like pure science fiction—the kind of tech that belonged in a galaxy far, far away, not here on boring old Earth. Well, it turns out I was wrong about the “boring old Earth” part. ...