If you’ve ever seen Minority Report you may have been impressed with Tom Cruise’s gesture-based computer interface. The interface was cool and cinematic, as Cruise waved his arms around in swirls of colors, graphics, and information, but it required too much effort, your arms would get tired after awhile.

But it does raise an interesting question: will human-technology interfaces be radically different in the future? What will replace the mouse and keyboard?

Over the last ten years or so, I’ve greatly enjoyed William Shatner’s career, from his acting to his “musical performances.” I appreciate the camp and self-parody he displays on his CDs.

In Robert Coover’s novel The Universal Baseball Association, the protagonist Henry Waugh creates a detailed stats-based baseball game played with dice, similar to games like APBA and Strat-O-Matic that many of us played as kids and beyond. He creates entire seasons with his eight-team league, keeping intricate statistics for the players and teams. He imagines back-stories and personalities for his players, serving as the league’s official historian as he records reams of articles and pages.