In what can only be described as a strange collision of two distinct yet oddly similar universes of the geek canon, Steve Wozniak — Apple co-founder, friend of Steve Jobs, and chief scientist of chip memory concern Fusion-io — will have a conversation at Thursday’s DEMO conference with Leonard Nimoy, the actor famous for playing Spock in the “Star Trek” TV and film series.

Fusion just announced the pairing on its corporate blog. The company says the two will “share their thoughts on technology’s past, present and future.”

It’s probably no surprise that Wozniak was a fan of the original 1960s vintage TV show in his early adulthood. In a speech he delivered at a conference earlier this year he said that during his days working at Hewlett-Packard designing calculators, he’d come home from work “watch ‘Star Trek,’ eat a TV dinner, and do electronics projects.” So Woz will probably be thrilled to hang out with Nimoy, who’s always been a favorite among the “Star Trek” fan community.

It’s a little hard to guess precisely what all this will have to do with Fusion-io’s flash memory technology, which essentially speeds up conventional servers by adding an extra layer of memory to keep data close by the processor so it doesn’t stand around waiting for the hard drive to catch up. Nimoy is, however, an old hand at talking about how consumer technology that was science fiction on the TV show — mobile phones are essentially “Star Trek” communicators, for example — is now a reality. (See the video below for an example of that.) I’m sure it will be fun to see regardless.

One thing that will happen: A geek swarm on Foursquare. Woz is active on Foursquare, so expect lots of his followers to check in all at once and maybe trigger a swarm.

What do you get when you mix classic science-fiction novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs with a Confederate solider and Mars?

Why, “John Carter,” of course.

Here is the trailer for the movie, which is chock-full of elaborate special effects:

When you look at all the prophecies about the future that have come true in the span of just 20 years — and now at the growing cadre of online education start-ups that have cropped up — it’s time to check in with the legend behind it all: The late, great science-fiction author Isaac Asimov.

As you will see from the video below (from an interview with Bill Moyers), what Asimov said, way back when, is finally coming true.

Of course.

It’s a bit long, but well worth your time:

It’s been more than 30 years since my favorite American bard, John Prine, sang that lyric, and it came to mind as I sat down today to meet with Brian David Johnson, who is, to my recollection, the first person I’ve ever known to carry the job title “futurist.” And yes, it sounds a little specious, until you find out he works as a futurist for the chipmaker Intel, which certainly has a long-term strategic interest in anticipating the demands of the future well before they happen.

Johnson was a guest today on The Wall Street Journal’s “Digits” program, which I co-hosted with the Journal’s affable Simon Constable. Johnson is in New York to speak at Comic Con about Intel’s Tomorrow Project, which aims to ask honestly what computing may be like 15 or 20 years from now — and the implications for our daily lives.

Think back to 1996 and you probably had some idea of what 2011 would be like. But did you really? You may have had a cellphone, but would you have imagined how much of your daily life would be punctuated by its use, beyond making phone calls? If you were to zap back in time and have a conversation with the 1996 you about life in 2011, you’d probably have to rely on science fiction to get the point across. “You know the communicator and tricorder from ‘Star Trek’? Yeah, we basically have those. We call them smartphones, and they’re kind of a big deal,” the 2011 you might say. “And they’re also the talking computers from ‘Star Trek.’ And you won’t believe who makes them.”

Science fiction makes it possible, Johnson says, to have a conversation about the future, by giving us the metaphors we need to figure out what we want and don’t want to happen. Hence “The Tomorrow Project Anthology,” a collection of short stories set in the future, imagining plausible situations emerging from science fact of today. One volume of the anthology was published earlier this year, and a new one is out now.

What happens, on some hypothetical day in the future, when passwords are easily and readily hackable and all our personal information is more or less available for all the world to see and take and use? That’s what the writer Cory Doctorow asks in his story, “The Knights of the Rainbow Table,” which appears in the new volume.

So these are some of the things that Simon and I talked about with Johnson in today’s closing segment on “Digits,” which you can see below. Enjoy.

*Lyrics from “Living in the Future,” by John Prine, from the 1980 album “Storm Windows.”

“Tablet was the focus, but the changes we did also free it up to be more flexible for other contexts as well,” Honeycomb lead designer Matias Duarte told Mobilized. “It’s about really eliminating all the barriers to all the different kinds of form factors that people might want to interact with.”

Google plans to show off its work with Honeycomb, also known as Android 3.0, at an event on Wednesday. There, it will talk about the specific changes it has made, as well as the vision behind the shift.

Duarte, who joined Google from Palm last year, said there were really three major areas of focus. Clearly one was to change the way Android worked so that it was suited to devices larger than a phone. But beyond that, Duarte said, Honeycomb was about evolving Android to be better overall at mobile computing tasks. Finally, Duarte said, Honeycomb is designed to make the operating system more usable.

“All of those are works in progress,” he said. “Our work is far from done in any of those.”

One of the most notable changes in Honeycomb is the fact that it no longer has a reliance on physical hardware buttons. That paves the way for all kinds of devices, Duarte said.

“Some of them might look more like a laptop…some of them might not even have soft buttons,” Duarte said. “They might be purely gesturally driven.”

The first Honeycomb devices, however, will all be tablets, starting with the Motorola Xoom, which is headed to Verizon in February.

But, if he has done his job right, Duarte said that hardware makers will be able to create devices that Google never even contemplated. “Whatever they come up with, the most important thing is that we have given that flexibility.”

That could range to attaching Android to a refrigerator or creating products aimed at a specific demographic, such as young kids or the elderly. Heck, someone could even use Android to build a big table computer to take on Microsoft’s Surface. “I can’t see why not,” Duarte said. “I can imagine that.”

As for the potential tablets in particular, Duarte notes that those who initially brushed aside Apple’s iPad when it debuted a year ago underestimated the impact of what Apple did in bringing the multi-touch screen to a larger-size device.

“I think those skeptics were short-sighted,” Duarte said. “That’s the genius of what Apple achieved with that iPad.”

The tablet experience, he said, is largely about the touch interface, which changes people’s relationship with the content they are viewing. In moving the content into a closer and more comfortable position, people relate more and have more emotional experiences, he said.

“People have seen screens that size and have been taking screens that size to bed with them and to their coffee shops with them. They’ve been sitting with them hunched over and in all kinds of contorted positions” Duarte said. “But having that touch interface means that you can interact with the Internet or with a book or with a video player in a totally different posture, in a totally different way. It changes how you engage with the content, how long you engage with the content and even how emotionally close you are to it.”

With Honeycomb, Duarte said, he wanted to make sure that Google was opening Android up to enable those kinds of experiences, but also improving the underpinnings of the operating system to be a more powerful computing experience.

One of the changes, he said, is recognizing that people use tablets differently than they use their phone, even if they are running many of the same types of programs.

“It used to be that Android was something that you held in your hand and you would use in these relatively fine slices of time throughout the day, and then when you sit down at a table or a desk or you go home, that Android stays in your pocket or goes in a charger,” he said. “Now your experience with Android is alternating between these fine slices and these longer periods….So we need to think of Android as an experience that you have 24/7, throughout the entire day. What that means is that you are doing a lot more and you are doing a lot more for longer periods of time.”

That shift, he said, means that the operating system needs to do a better job of shifting between tasks and notifying users of what things are going on in the background. With Honeycomb, Duarte said, Google is improving its recent application switching feature that lets users easily see the places they have been working and point to them, while at the same time getting better notifications from background activities without being constantly interrupted.

Duarte characterized Honeycomb as the biggest change since the debut of Android, but it is also the latest in a series of updates that have come in rapid succession. In many cases, both device makers and wireless carriers have struggled to keep pace with Google, often failing to allow their devices to stay updated with Google’s latest and greatest, even if the phones themselves were capable of being upgraded.

But while others wonder whether Google is moving too quickly in evolving Android, Duarte said he wonders why the rest of the industry is moving so slowly, and promises even faster change to come.

“Using computers suck, to this day,” Duarte said. “It’s one of my daily frustrations that the rate of change in computing experiences is so slow.”

In particular, Duarte said that the basic interaction with programs and files hasn’t changed much. “It’s the same way I did [things] in high school on a Mac Plus.”

One piece of that shift, Durate said, is evolving our expectations of computing devices from a world in which computer users put in information and turn a crank to get a result to one that more resembles an ongoing dialogue.

“What I am looking for is that sense that you get when jazz musicians improvise together,” he said. “The computer should be doing things in concert with you, in support [of] you, not acting like a servant waiting for commands and then returning with results. That’s a little aspirational, I know.”

Honeycomb will get the company partway to that vision, but Duarte said much of that work will reveal itself over time. But make no mistake, he said–although they don’t appear to be the stuff of science fiction, computers are starting to become extensions of the human brain.

“People always think of cybernetics with computers as being this thing that happens far in the future, and you have Star Trek, Borg-like scary things” Duarte said. “But the way computers are used today through social networking, through email, through accessing information like Google–they are already becoming [those] cybernetic parts of our mind.”

Okay, this one looks cool and is very densely packed with special effects.

Here’s the trailer for “I Am Number Four,” about a hunted kid with superpowers, a film with an even more super pedigree. Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg are producing the movie for DreamWorks Animation SKG.

It’s based on a teen science-fiction book written by Jobie Hughes and James Frey.

Enjoy:

For the last month or so, the Google homepage has played with the famous colored-letter logo by morphing it into a sci-fi in-joke and later adding another “l” to indicate the company’s 11th birthday.

The former–which included logos with alien spaceships and crop circles–was to honor writer H.G. Wells, author of “War of the Worlds” and other science fiction.

Now, a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi–the Indian leader whose 140th birthday anniversary is today–has become the “G” in the logo. (If you click on the image, it links to a search for his last name.)

While the impulse to do so seems hard to resist, I am not quite sure I much like Google (GOOG)–even with good intentions to educate and honor–using the image of one of the world’s great political leaders and peace advocates as a letter on a search service homepage, even if it will be seen worldwide.

(The poor Gosselin kids as a “G”? Oprah as an “O”? Liza Minelli as an “L”? I am totally down with that!)

Then again, I might be a tad grumpy on this issue since I also didn’t like Gandhi’s photo being used in that “Think Different” Apple (AAPL) marketing campaign more than a decade ago, which made him seem like some sort of advertising pitchman.

In any case, here’s the real thing to truly appreciate his impact on this world–Gandhi’s actual voice in his famous “One World” speech in 1931:

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Memo to all Cyborg Geeks:

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology….We can make him better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.”

Wait, that’s “The Six Million Dollar Man” motto!

But it might as well apply to the entertainment outfit that owns the “Terminator” movie franchise.

Today, according to blogger Nikke Finke of Deadline Hollywood, the Halcyon Holding Group, after recently filing for Chapter 11 protection, has hired FTI Capital Advisors “to evaluate strategic alternatives for the company.”

In other words: Selling off Skynet!

Halcyon, which made the most recent “Terminator Salvation” film and “owns the first-look rights to the works of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick,” has been fighting with a hedge fund that gave it money to buy the famous series that takes a very bleak view of the future.

Almost as bleak as that of Halcyon if it doesn’t come up with a plan to bring me my annual dose of cybernetic organisms, which is–of course!–living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.

It better be back.

Here’s the original trailer for the very first “Terminator” movie, which pretty much rocks:

Famed science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died yesterday at 90 years old.

The prolific Clarke, pictured here, who was also a scientist and deep-sea diver, was most famous for his novel, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It was, of course, made into an award-winning movie, directed by Stanley Kubrick.

But I have always been an admirer of Clarke’s three laws of prediction, which are wholly applicable to the digital arena and–more to the point–are spot-on:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

It was actually Clarke who was indistinguishable from magic.

And here’s a video of the first unforgettable minute of “2001″ (Duum! Duum! DUUUM! Dum! Dum!).

(The movie, by the way, features one of my favorite lines from any film, delivered by the menacing computer, HAL: “Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave?” I employ it frequently in the same dulcet tone with my kids.)