Science Fiction
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For Those Who Read In Bed
I read in bed a lot, and I'm fascinated by science fictional ways to be able to do it better. For example, in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein writes about a perfectly doable reading machine:
A collaboration between The Great Eastern Hotel and fourteen students from the Royal College of Arts has created an interesting new way to read in bed. The blanket shown below was designed by Tiago da Fonseca.
The bed in her room was as modern as next week, with automassage, coffee dispenser, weather control, reading machine, etc. Jill decided that she would probably not oversleep, crawled into bed, slid the spool into the reading machine, lay back and scanned the words streaming across the ceiling.
(Read more about Heinlein's reading machine)
(Project Sleepless: Bedtime Stories)
Each layer of the blanket contains another page of the story. As you read through the story, you add layers of warmth (or take them off and get cooler) depending which side you're sleeping on.
(From Project Sleepless: Bedtime Stories 2)
There's no problem when you fall asleep reading; you just keep the page you're on. Heinlein had a solution to that problem as well.
It turns out that this problem of falling asleep while going through a story vexes Lucent as well; see their Lucent DVR Sleep Detector for details.
From The Style Files via dirty.ru.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 7/25/2007)
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