Does life imitate art or vice versa?

I read this article about hooking up a cell phone to a hand-held scanner to do basic medical scanning. The image can be sent over the web to the family doctor for analysis. The apparatus looks something like this:

Pretty cool, huh? That could be a lifesaving setup for people that live in remote areas or far away from a specialist.

But for some of us in geekdom, it looks a bit familiar.

Kind of looks like we aren't terribly far from Dr. McCoy's Feinberger medical scanner (which looks like a salt shaker-because it is a salt shaker). Or from the tricorder, come to think of it.

I thought the communicator from the original Star Trek looked pretty cool.

 But there's no way we'd ever have a handheld wireless device that would allow people on opposite sides of the planet to talk to each other. Would we?!?

Oops. Guess so. And a modern smartphone has way more apps than Kirk's communicator had.

In some episodes of the original Star Trek, Captain Kirk could be seen signing some sort of tablet with lights on it. No doubt some high-tech device connected to the ship's mainframe. The tablet looked like this:

Certainly, something like this would take a century or so to develop, wouldn't it? Well, no, actually.

Here, Spock can be seen programming a computer with some sort of portable media. Back in the days of tape reel data storage, that must have looked highly implausible.

Hmm. Been there, done that.

Get those big clunky 3.5 inchers out of here and bring me a flash drive!

A tiny color television monitor on a tabletop? Surely not!

Or is the proper question Why is the screen so big and clumsy?

About the only thing we don't have is a decent hand phaser:

The best we can do there is the Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser...

...which won't fit on a belt.

Next time you laugh at the 'cheesy' special effects on an episode of the original Star Trek, think about how much they got right on a shoestring TV budget.

I can't help but wonder that if we didn't have science fiction shows on TV, would we have some of the neat devices we use every day? Did the engineers who came up with some designs imitate what they saw? Or would the natural progression of events naturally mean that these items would have been developed anyway?

Something to think on for the weekend.

yankeedog out.