Watches!
I hadn't really noticed it myself until you mentioned it, but my watch habits have changed. I'm more Dave's age than Chris's but I rarely wear a watch now, I mostly use my phone, but I'm usually at a PC or in the car which have their own clocks anyway. It probably helps that my phone isn't a smartphone. I pick it up, press a button and read it. I miss my Nokia 6210i which didn't have a colour display, so it always showed the time! But if I am going somewhere important, whether it be an interview, a formal dinner or whatever, I feel lost without a watch. If it is a geek thing, then it has to be the Casio CFX-200 (see my profile photo). It doesn't have the hex/bin mode of the CFX-400 but I much prefer the style. For something posher, I wear a modern black anodised analogue watch with luminous hands. I find analogue watches are useless at telling absolute time, but are great for relative measurement. I used to have a combination analogue+digital watch, which was in theory the best solution. In reality it was just ugly and clumsy to use.
LVDC home power? Won't happen. Two wiring systems in every home? Clumsy as hell. Especially when you consider the efficiency of small power converters, there is naff all efficiency gain to be made.
Space is 100km guys, not 100,000ft (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A1rm%C3%A1n_line). NASA use 122km as the start point of atmospheric drag for re-entry, so you would need to be well above that for orbit. The USAF "space" thing is absolute guff, purely a gimmick. Concorde regularly flew at 60,000ft (limited by legislation not plane performance) and you could clearly see the curvature of the earth and a dark sky. No space suit needed, just a leather armchair, champagne and smoked salmon. 41 years after it first flew, and the engineering on Concorde still utterly astounds me.
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