Star Trek's Design Influence On Palm, New Tech

kevcol writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has a fun article describing how many of the inventions of Star Trek have made early appearances, 2 centuries ahead of Captain Kirk's time. They talk with one of Palm's UI designers, who admits that '...my first sketches were influenced by the UI of the Enterprise bridge panels', and also notes: 'When we designed the first Treo... it had a form factor similar to the communicators in the original series. It had a speakerphone mode so you could stand there and talk into it like Capt. Kirk'."

Speaking of medical tech

[detritus`]

The needle-less shots McCoy would give for every little thing are not that far off either, DMSO is a popular one that's used for horses, but you wouldnt want that one used on yourself unless you love the taste/smell of dead fish...

Re:missed this one?

[djh101010]

Temperature and heart rate should be easy - infrared pyrometers are used in industry to measure, with accuracy, the temperature of a surface, no reason it shouldn't work to point it at a person & get a number. Heart rate - several optical ways, no problem, or a directional microphone and appropraite sound processing - again, nothing too complicated.

Blood pressure, though...since BP is measured by finding the two points where (1) the pressure in the cuff blocks all flow, and (2) the pressure in the cuff blocks no flow, I can't see an easy way to get that without actually blocking and unblocking said flow.

Non-inavsive blood pressure systems work by "listening" to the pulse with a pressure transducer & working some fairly mundane math to get the numbers, but I just can't see a way to find out how much pressure it takes to occlude a blood vessel without...occluding that blood vessel.

Re:Speaking of medical tech

[grub]

They already have units that blast the medicine/vaccine through the skin at high pressure. They're mainly used when they have to process a lot of people in a short time.

Teleportation - Electrons No Problem

[meehawl]

How's develpment on the transporter coming?

Quantum teleportation [wikipedia.org] is progressing slowly. Teleporting electrons [aps.org] using quantum entanglment [wikipedia.org] has been done. Scaling it up to macroscopic sizes and massively superposed states is not trivial.

Re:Beam me up scotty!

[Mateito]

However, he DID say it in "Star Trek 4: The
Voyage Home"... which of course in an even numbered movie.

Re:Beam me up scotty!

[brucmack]

Well, technically Kirk never said anything in ST:TOS. When he was speaking, it wasn't called Star Trek: The Original Series, was it? :)

Re:Then why?

[Jexx Dragon]

Yep, my dad has one. Well, its a phone with a "walkie-talkie" mode.

Re:Speaking of medical tech

[WeaverBen]

Don't forget patches for nicotine, estrogen, etc., etc.

Re:Science or Fiction

[cmburns69]

Don't forget that QWERTY was initially designed to slow down typists, due to the tendency of typewriters to jam if you typed too fast.

They've been here for years....

[BobSutan]

".... are not that far off either...."

They've been "here" for quite a while now. I guess they're just not widely used. Case in point: when I went throught basic training back in '97 almost all of the shots were given with needleless injectors. I don't think they called them hyposprays, but they were effectively the same device. IIRC it was basically just a regular shot with a high PSI load behind it. There is a drawback though--you had be really still when they gave it to you or would cut the skin like a little razor (due to the insanely high pressure).

Re:Beam me up scotty!

[CrazyTalk]

Sorry, he still did not say that. I believe it was "Scotty, beam me up" in ST4. As close as he ever got to uttering the imortal phrase.

Re:missed this one?

[neil.orourke]

Actually, it is.

You're referring to the aura that a patient develops when a seizure (fit) is going to happen. The usual indicators of an aura is:
- Metallic taste in the mouth;
- Visual distortion (red tint, sometimes blue tint or solid object moving / morphing); and
- Strange / intense headaches.

All these are experienced by the patient - they are not necessarliy obvious to the observer. An observer can sometimes pick when a seizure is going to happen.

The point about dogs is that they can pick up a seizure apparently by smell alone - sometimes several hours in advance. Some dogs can even detect a seizure before the patient's aura develops. There's definitely someting interesting happening here.

Re:horrible

[MagicDude]

From the Star Trek Technical Manual - Page 34

We incorporated the concept of software-definable, task specific panel layout into our controls because Mike (Okuda) thought it a logical way of simplifying designs that would otherwise have been nightmarishly complex. The basic idea is that the panels automatically reconfigure themselves to suit the specific task at hand. A side benefit we discovered is this gave our actors much more freedom in hitting controls to accomplish various tasks. Even though out case tries to get things right, there are numerous occasions when a particular shot will require an actor to hit a button on a specific area of a panel, which may not reflect out original design for that panel. Variable layout control panels mean that the button that fires phasers this week is not necessarily the same button that fires them next week.

Re:Science or Fiction

[Dun Malg]

Informative? Try incorrect [earthlink.net]. From the linked text:

For years, popular writers have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. In fact, his motives were just the opposite.

When Sholes built his first model in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. At the time, Milwaukee was a backwoods town. The crude machine shop tools available there could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision. Yes, the first typewriter was sluggish. Yes, it did clash and jam when someone tried to type with it. But Sholes was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it.

The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances.

He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced.

The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878 (see drawing), some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down. I csn't believe people still think Sholes crippled his layout to slow people down.

Needle-less shots PREDATED Star Trek

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Spray hypodermics predated the Star Trek series. McCoy's injector was based on them - though of course vastly improved. (Dial-a-drug, hand-held rather than big gun with compressor sidekick, etc.)

The original discovery was made when a worker handled a high-pressure hydraulic hose with a pinhole leak, and reported to medical with a sore spot in his hand. The medic found a teaspoon or so of hydraulic fluid under the skin - but the worker hadn't felt it going in. Investigation quickly identified the leak and thus resulted in the discovery that a very small, very high-speed, jet of fluid will go subcutaneous or even intramusclular with minimal sensation.

Somehow this info didn't get lost, but resulted in the bright idea of doing it deliberately to reduce the discomfort and increase the speed and convenience of injections - especially mass injections. The military funded development of the first devices (primarily because they have to innoculate thousands of troops in batches efficiently, and also so they could innoculate a civilian population rapidly in case of a biowar attack - this being during the "cold war".)