{"id":7011,"date":"2015-03-03T17:50:11","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T00:50:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=7011"},"modified":"2015-03-03T17:50:11","modified_gmt":"2015-03-04T00:50:11","slug":"can-you-beam-me-up-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2015\/03\/03\/can-you-beam-me-up-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Can You Beam Me Up Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have a confession: I hate talking on cell phones. Cordless handsets for landlines, too. Sure, it&#8217;s convenient to walk around the house while you&#8217;re talking to someone, but at least back in the days when we were tethered to the kitchen wall by a 20-foot length of curly vinyl cord, we rarely had static or random noise in the line, and calls never just &#8220;dropped out&#8221; because you walked through some <em>Poltergeist<\/em>-ian &#8220;dead spot.&#8221; (I live in an old house, and plaster-and-lathe walls are murder on reception.)<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I can&#8217;t help but roll my eyes when some Damn Kid\u2122 starts acting all superior and sniffing at how outdated the original <em>Star Trek<\/em> looks because the communicators used by Kirk and Spock aren&#8217;t as &#8220;sophisticated&#8221; as our modern-day smartphones. Um, kids, do you really think your iPhone has enough range to contact a spaceship <em>in orbit<\/em>? And have you <em>ever<\/em> seen a communicator fail to make or maintain contact with the guy on the other end (assuming some mysterious god-like entity wasn&#8217;t interfering with their operation, of course)?<\/p>\n<p>The following illustrates my point quite handily, by showing what <em>Star Trek<\/em> would be like if communicators functioned as well (i.e., as unreliably) as our cell phones:<\/p>\n<p>(Sensitive Loyal Readers be warned: there&#8217;s an F-bomb. But it&#8217;s <em>funny<\/em>.)<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"725\" height=\"408\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/QxSfctXJDdw?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>And yes, I know the video is riffing on <em>The Next Generation <\/em>and its &#8220;combadge&#8221; technology instead of the original series&#8217; classic <a href=\"http:\/\/en.memory-alpha.org\/wiki\/File:Starfleet_communicator,_2260s.jpg\">handheld communicators<\/a>. Even so&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Via <a href=\"http:\/\/boingboing.net\/2015\/03\/02\/if-star-trek-comms-were-as-cra.html\">Boing Boing<\/a>, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a confession: I hate talking on cell phones. Cordless handsets for landlines, too. Sure, it&#8217;s convenient to walk around the house while you&#8217;re talking to someone, but at least back in the days when we were tethered to the kitchen wall by a 20-foot length of curly vinyl cord, we rarely had static [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-something-that-bugs-me","category-star-trek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7011\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}