Friday 25 January 2013

Why Star Trek Doesn't Suck

Trekkies: the final frontier. These are the voyages of Lucy on a 4 week mission to explore strange new people, to seek out their strange life and normal conversations, to boldly go where no non-trekkie has gone before.    

I am sharing my office at the moment with a couple of the IT team while their office is being overhauled, scrubbed down and probably decontaminated and it's best described as an experience.
I know nothing about what they are speaking to each other about 99% of the time and we have already christened one Sheldon and the other Leonard which they seemed quite happy about, i knew we should have gone with Penny and Amy Farrah Fowler but it's too late now.
Anyhoo, apart from The Big Bang Theory, what we would do if we could time travel and the TV show True Blood, we have very little in common and Sheldon and Leonard seemed disturbed when i failed to get as excited as they were about the news that scientists have invented a Tractor Beam just like in Star Trek. 
After a quick discussion which began with me asking what the...they were banging on about and ended the same way, it transpires, apparently, that our lives have been advanced in many ways by the TV series about the adventures of the Starship Enterprise.     
Obviously noticing my disdain for the statement, Sheldon then went on to explain how the 'Hypospray' used by Bones which sees inoculations sprayed deep into the skin so no needles are used is commonly used by medical types today.
Then Leonard chipped in that the communicators pre-dated mobile phones by several decades, and the cool flippy motion that activated the device was designed with a nod to the Trek.   
Now they have came up with a Tractor Beam which is, as far as i understand, a laser beam that acts like a tow rope and can be used to tether one thing to another thing.
I congratulated them on their knowledge and agreed that Star Trek has indeed contributed to science, technology and medicine and left them alone to gloat.
Then i stuck their new copy of 'Call of Duty' in the microwave and left it to fry.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

interesting, having spent 25 years in IT in some capacity or another i can say that american IT people are mediocre at IT (but they talk a lot to intimidate the average person who no less about IT) and they are poor physicists at best...

q

Lucy said...

Ours might be q, i don't know but they seem to know how to fix things which is all i care about. Maybe its just our IT people but they do seem to all like anything with a bit of science attached to it.