Technobabble

During the filming of "Star Trek: The Next Generation", there would frequently come times when the story called for the characters (and in the early days, it was often that bane of Trekkies everywhere, Wesley Crusher, the Platonic Ideal of Dork) to fix some far-future technical problem. Which means said characters had to employ far-future tech. Which by definition hasn't been invented yet. What happened over the course of the series was that they engaged a couple of people to be in charge of continuity and technology, and the script writers would insert into the scripts, "[technobabble here]", leaving the staff TechGeek to insert the proper futuristic-sounding tech gibberish. You know: Stuff that sounds realistically scientific, but is really just verbal handwaving. "Tachyon fields"; "Inertial dampers"; and so on. Welcome to my non-fictional, non-Star Trek, highly-idiosyncratic take on tech, tech-related topics, and sometimes random stuff that's just obliquely related to tech that was triggered by me reading or hearing or seeing something that happened to drift through the wide-open transom of my brain and get stuck there. Some of the items you will see here are funny, some I hope are thought-provoking, some could probably be filed under the hashtag of #DougRant, filtered through what my life-partner calls my "weird perspective". If you enjoy reading them, then they will have served their purpose. So read on and, hopefully, enjoy!