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If one were to divide the time spent creating a document or otherwise operating the computer into different activites, operating the mouse would probably not score high, as much as we feel we use the mouse.

The mouse is nonetheless a nuisance to those of us who prefer to rest our hands on the keyboard as we type. Having to maneuvering the damn rodent around in order to, say, emphasize a word is perhaps easy on the memory, but it means you have to move your hand off the keyboard, onto the mouse, moving the mouse pointer to wherever it must be, marking the word, and then either finding the formatting option in a menu or in a toolbar.

I miss the days of WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, which certainly had its shortcomings, but many of the often-used sequences were quickly built into our "hand memory," and any special mark-ups or changes was a question of pressing the 'F' and number keys in an appropriate order. It was somewhat user hostily for its non-intuitive approach, but mouse pains were unheard of, and using the keyboard was many times faster than today's mouse operations.

Dontclik.it also thinks that clicking around is a nuisance, and proposes a use of the mouse that eliminates the need for clicking. The flash interface on dontclick.it illustrates the concept neatly. The method is a combination of focus-following and mouse gestures.

Focus-following is well-known by seasoned Unix users since the early 1990es, and is a feature provided by the window manager where you simply hover the mouse above a window or entry field where you want your mouse or keyboard focus to be.

Mouse gestures, like focus-following, are also known on the most popular Linux desktops albeit perhaps less used. Mouse gestures is a technique where a certain motion of the mouse corresponds to a certain action. For example, a swift down motion of the mouse followed by an up motion might correspond to minimizing the window. Dontclick.it suggests that instead of clicking a button, you circle around it with the mouse, indicating that you want this button activated.

Unfortunately, the approach doesn't eliminate the mouse. I do mind clicking, but that's a lesser mouse evil. What I really hate about the mouse is having to take my hands off the keyboard, books, og whatever I'm using and use my hand for maneuvering the damn rodent around. Dontclick.it may solve the clicking part of using the mouse, but it still advocates using the mouse, offering no end of carpal tunnel syndromes caused by repetitive mouse usage.

What's worse, replacing a click with a circular movement of the mouse obviously means you can rest your index finger, but at the cost of making a circular movement that requires even more motion of your arm and hand. I'm afraid if this concept were to replace the conventional use of the mouse, pains related to mouse use would increase, and I don't see how the circular movement can somehow be faster or easier on the hand than a simple click.

Donald Norman, the author of books such as The Psychology of Everyday Things, has argued that the perfect user interface is invisible. No user should be forced to wonder how to operate a certain gadget--it should be so intuitive that the gadget, or at least the use of it, would hardly be noticed. Think of the ABS brakes in your car, for example: when you apply pressure to the brake pedal, you don't pause to think about the computer that analyzes your driving conditions and takes care of the braking system. In fact, I'm rather sure you don't ever want to think of a pop-up window asking you to confirm your decision to brake. It would bring an entirely new meaning to the term "computer crash," I'm sure.

Many everyday objects have user interfaces that we would consider intuitive. For example, you'd think your door has a very intuitive user interface. You turn the knob, and the door opens. Or, if you live in Europe, you twist the handle, and the door opens. Or, you turn the knob the other way if the door won't open. Unless it's locked. If it's a handle, maybe the handle budges because the door is locked, or because you need to move it upward instead of downward. Of course, it may be possible to turn the know or twist the handle and still be faced with a closed door, because it's locked. All of a sudden, perhaps it isn't all that intuitive after all? For the person that was raised in a society unfamiliar with door handles, the door could be eternally locked. It is clear that opening a door requires a certain amount of social schooling in the use of everyday things.

Naomi Thellier de Poncheville suggests a design, aptly named the "Hand-le," that literally lends a helping hand to those that might wonder which part of the door requires manual operation. Her page unfortunately only illustrates the design and does not describe how the handle is to be operated.

A visual inspection of the hand-le design indicates that the handle turns clock-wise or counter-clockwise. If the Western greeting practice of grabbed the hand firmly and shaking it were to apply, the hand-le would require at least some sort of up/down toggling motion, so unfortunately the conventional greeting gesture will probably not cause the passage to open.

The circular motion indicates that the hand-le is a modification of the American door knob, and that the hand-le is to be grabbed and rotated rather than shaken. Compared with the European handle that may be operated with an elbow if the user's hands are occupied, the hand-le inherits the door knob's inherent disadvantage in that respect.

By Donald Norman's user interface standards, I'm afraid the hand-le would receive a thumbs-down rating for a design that is no more intuitive than the usual door knobs and handles, as it would require the same social training as the conventional handles.

I'll hand it to the hand-le that it looks quite good, but I've seen door knobs and door handles in many shapes that I considered much more appealing. I suspect the primary design motivation was the designer's wish to make a pun.

Invite your favorite mathematician friend over and pour his next drink from a Klein Bottle, and you'll have won his respect once and for all.

As mathematicians will know--and I'm sure your friend will go into great length and detail--a Klein Bottle is a mathematical construct hatched by Felix Klein a century and a half ago, when he imagined that two Möbius Loops could be combined to form a single-sided bottle with no boundary.

In practice, this means you have a surface that is wrapped in such a way that its inside is basically also its outside. It can't be done in our three-dimensional world, but you can get reasonably close.

With the glass Klein Bottles produced by Acme Klein Bottle, you can have such a strange construct yourself. With a Klein Bottle drinking glass you're really pouring your drink into your glass by pouring it on the outside of the glass, and a full bottle of wine is literally empty even if it's clearly full, because mathematically speaking the bottle can have no contents in the sense that it doesn't bound a volume.

I expect to purchase a Klein Bottle one day, primarily because I want to be able to accidentally spill my drink right onto the table outside of the Klein Bottle drinking glass, expecting the drink to appear inside of the glass nonetheless. I'm just hoping that the zero-volume property won't prevent me from drinking from the glass which, by definition, will always be empty.