Why Touch Screens Will Not Take Over

Why personal computers still need the keyboard and mouse, despite Microsoft's best efforts to kill them off
By David Pogue

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For decades the cynical observer could be forgiven for viewing Microsoft as a giant copying machine. The inspiration for just about every major Microsoft initiative can be traced back to a successful predecessor: Windows (Macintosh), Internet Explorer (Netscape), Bing (Google), Zune (iPod).
But in late 2012 Microsoft broke from the pack. It made a billion-dollar gamble that personal computing is taking a new direction. The gamble was Windows 8, and the direction is touch.
Using a series of fluid, light finger taps and swipes across the screen on a PC running Windows 8, you can open programs, flip between them, navigate, adjust settings and split the screen between apps, among other functions. It's fresh, efficient and joyous to use—all on a touch-screen tablet.
But this, of course, is not some special touch-screen edition of Windows. This is the Windows. It's the operating system that Microsoft expects us to run on our tens of millions of everyday PCs. For screens that do not respond to touch, Microsoft has built in mouse and keyboard equivalents for each tap and swipe. Yet these methods are second-class citizens, meant to be a crutch during these transitional times—the phase after which, Microsoft bets, touch will finally have come to all computers.
At first, you might think, “Touch has been incredibly successful on our phones, tablets, airport kiosks and cash machines. Why not on our computers?”
I'll tell you why not: because of “gorilla arm.”
There are three big differences between these handy touch screens and a PC's screen: angle, distance and time interval.
The screen of a phone or tablet is generally more or less horizontal. The screen of a desktop (or a laptop on a desk), however, is more or less vertical.
Phone, tablet and kiosk screens, furthermore, are usually close to your body. But desktop and laptop screens are usually a couple of feet away from you. You have to reach out to touch them. And then there's the interval issue: you don't sit there all day using a phone, tablet or airport kiosk, as you do with a PC.
Finally, you're not just tapping big, finger-friendly icons. You're trying to make tiny, precise movements on the glass, on a vertical surface, at arm's length.
When Windows 7 came out, offering a touch mode for the first time, I spent a few weeks living with a couple of touch-screen PCs. It was a miserable experience. Part of the problem was that the targets—buttons, scroll bars and menus that were originally designed for a tiny arrow cursor—were too small for fat human fingers.
The other problem was the tingling ache that came from extending my right arm to manipulate that screen for hours, an affliction that has earned the nickname of gorilla arm. Some experts say gorilla arm is what killed touch computing during its first wave in the early 1980s.
(Another problem is finger grease. You can clean a phone's screen by wiping it on your jeans, but that's not as convenient with a 32-inch monitor.)
Now, half of Windows 8 addresses half of the touch-screen PC problems: Windows 8 is actually two operating systems in one. The beautiful, fluid front end is ideal for touch; only the underlying Windows desktop has the too-small-targets problem.
The angle and distance of PC screens are tougher nuts to crack. Microsoft is betting that Windows 8 will be so attractive that we won't mind touching our PC screens, at least until the PC concept fades away entirely. Yet although PC sales have slowed, they won't be zero any time soon.
My belief is that touch screens make sense on mobile computers but not on stationary ones. Microsoft is making a gigantic bet that I'm wrong.
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ONLINE
Decoding Windows 8: ScientificAmerican.com/jan2013/pogue
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Quantum Gas Goes below Absolute Zero

Ultracold atoms pave way for negative-Kelvin materials
By Zeeya Merali and Nature magazine

sub-absolute-zero, quantum gas, thermometer, temperature Temperature in a gas can reach below absolute zero thanks to a quirk of quantum physics. Image: PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek/Thinkstock
From Nature magazine
It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery.
Lord Kelvin defined the absolute temperature scale in the mid-1800s in such a way that nothing could be colder than absolute zero. Physicists later realized that the absolute temperature of a gas is related to the average energy of its particles. Absolute zero corresponds to the theoretical state in which particles have no energy at all, and higher temperatures correspond to higher average energies.
However, by the 1950s, physicists working with more exotic systems began to realise that this isn't always true: Technically, you read off the temperature of a system from a graph that plots the probabilities of its particles being found with certain energies. Normally, most particles have average or near-average energies, with only a few particles zipping around at higher energies. In theory, if the situation is reversed, with more particles having higher, rather than lower, energies, the plot would flip over and the sign of the temperature would change from a positive to a negative absolute temperature, explains Ulrich Schneider, a physicist at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, Germany.



Peaks and valleys
Schneider and his colleagues reached such sub-absolute-zero temperatures with an ultracold quantum gas made up of potassium atoms. Using lasers and magnetic fields, they kept the individual atoms in a lattice arrangement. At positive temperatures, the atoms repel, making the configuration stable. The team then quickly adjusted the magnetic fields, causing the atoms to attract rather than repel each other. “This suddenly shifts the atoms from their most stable, lowest-energy state to the highest possible energy state, before they can react,” says Schneider. “It’s like walking through a valley, then instantly finding yourself on the mountain peak.”
At positive temperatures, such a reversal would be unstable and the atoms would collapse inwards. But the team also adjusted the trapping laser field to make it more energetically favourable for the atoms to stick in their positions. This result, described today in Science, marks the gas’s transition from just above absolute zero to a few billionths of a Kelvin below absolute zero.
Wolfgang Ketterle, a physicist and Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who has previously demonstrated negative absolute temperatures in a magnetic system, calls the latest work an “experimental tour de force”. Exotic high-energy states that are hard to generate in the laboratory at positive temperatures become stable at negative absolute temperatures — “as though you can stand a pyramid on its head and not worry about it toppling over,” he notes — and so such techniques can allow these states to be studied in detail. “This may be a way to create new forms of matter in the laboratory,” Ketterle adds.
If built, such systems would behave in strange ways, says Achim Rosch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cologne in Germany, who proposed the technique used by Schneider and his team. For instance, Rosch and his colleagues have calculated that whereas clouds of atoms would normally be pulled downwards by gravity, if part of the cloud is at a negative absolute temperature, some atoms will move upwards, apparently defying gravity.
Another peculiarity of the sub-absolute-zero gas is that it mimics 'dark energy', the mysterious force that pushes the Universe to expand at an ever-faster rate against the inward pull of gravity. Schneider notes that the attractive atoms in the gas produced by the team also want to collapse inwards, but do not because the negative absolute temperature stabilises them. “It’s interesting tha
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World's largest solar telescope planned near Ladakh's Pangong lake

PTI | Jan 5, 2013, 06.45 PM IST
READ MORE World's largest solar telescope|Tata Institute of Fundamental Research|Pangong Lake|McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope|Ladakh Solar Telescope
World's largest solar telescope planned near Ladakh's Pangong lake
Sun spots as seen through a solar telescope. The planned telescope at Ladakh will have an aperture size of two metres and is expected to be completed by 2017. (TOI photo)
KOLKATA: India is expected to start building the world's largest solar telescope on the icy heights of Ladakh to study the sun's atmosphere and understand the formation of sun-spots and their decay process.

The Rs 300-crore project is expected to come up at either Hanle or Merak, which is very near to the Ladakh's Pangong lake along the Line of Actual Control (LAC) with China.

Currently, the world's largest solar telescope is the McMath-Pierce Solar Telescope with an aperture size of 1.6 metres in Kitt Peak National Observatory at Arizona in the US.

"Fabrication of the National Large Solar Telescope is expected to begin in late 2013," Siraj Hasan, principal investigator for the project, told reporters on the sidelines of the 100th Indian Science Congress here.

The telescope, with an aperture size of two meters, is planned to be completed by 2017 and will be the largest such facility in the world at least till 2020 when US is expected to commission its four-meter telescope at Hawaii.

The main objective of the facility would be to study the formation and decay of sun spots, their subsurface structure and why do they have a penumbra and how is it formed, Hasan said.

Most of the back-end instruments of the telescope would be made in-house and the instrument for night time observations would be developed in collaboration with Hamburg Observatory in Germany.

NLST is expected to be a unique research tool which is likely to attract several talented solar astronomers to the country and provide a superior platform for performing high quality solar research, Hasan said.

Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics is the nodal agency for the project, which also has participation from Indian Space Research Organization, Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, IUCAA, IISc and IISER.
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