Cellphone lock-up

In the past I have suggested that young people  are too addicted to their cell phones. In spite of being prohibited from using them at work or in school, they are obsessed with texting and attempt to hide what they are doing so they won't get caught. As punishment, the offending cell phone user could have their smartphone secured in the EB Brands Cell Lock-up. It's the perfect punishment - a cell phone jail.

It can be purchased for less than $20.00 at amazon.com and other websites. Prices may vary.

The timer can be set for 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes. A"Breakout" alarm sounds if lock up is opened prematurely. At the end of the lockup, various phrases will play like:  "You Are Now Free To Phone", "Justice is Served Power Up", " It's Time To Rejoin Digital Society".

Imagine, the perfect cell-phone addicted teen tormentor!

Have you got an uncooperative teen? A tantrum-prone techno-addict who uses their cellphone to ignore the world around them?

Sentence their cell phone to the Cell Lock-up. The following sentences might be appropriate:

• 45 minutes: Clean up your room - must pass inspection before release.
• 1-hour: Finish your homework - finished homework must pass muster and spot checks with teacher will ensure compliance.
• 30 minutes consecutive: For each display of petulance, lack of cooperativeness, aggression, or other anti-social behaviour. Attitude changes mandatory before jail release.
• 15 minutes: For swearing, answering back or making faces.

Be inventive. Compliance contracts could specify the level of adherence required, and also include a list of punishments doled out as the consequences for breaking these terms. Feel free to share your suggestions in the comments below.

To ensure maximum compliance in the shortest amount of time, cell phones should be left on in the cage so that offending teens can hear it ringing, buzzing and vibrating - but not able to see the display. This will be followed by begging, pleading, promises, crying and perhaps tantrums. But the timer is an objective, uncaring judge and will only release when the sentence has been served.

In future, simple threats of cell phone jail should ensure rapid and polite compliance with your meager, reasonable requests.

Beam me up, eh?

Oh damn. Teleportation will probably not happen in my lifetime.

In Star Trek, teleportation allows you to materialize wherever faster than the time it takes Kirk to say "Beam me up, Scotty". The reality - even if the technology existed to make it possible - would be somewhat different, according to a group of physics students at the University of Leicester.

If slow broadband speeds are hard to cope with now, try beaming speed. Teleporting just one person off the surface of the Earth would take 350,000 times longer than the universe has been in existence using existing technology. What?

That may not be so surprising when you consider the amount of information being transmitted. Including all the data in the traveller's brain, this amounts to around 2.6 times 10 to the power of 42 bits - that is, 2.6 times one followed by 42 zeros or 2,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits of data - this would take 823,890,283,164,753,000,000 centuries to upload or download at 1 Gigabit (billions of bits) per second, give or take a century!!! Hardly the instant transportation we would come to expect in the future. Now if we had upload/download speeds of 1 Googolbit per second (number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), then this entire transport would take place in less than a second. THAT is more in keeping with what Start Trek technology can do.

But would you end up with the original, or a duplicate? If you were duplicated, would the original then have to be destroyed to avoid cloning?

OMG! Think of the possibilities! And the possible "data errors"!

• "What do you mean my ear is missing? I had two before I was beamed up?"

• "How do you explain I can't remember anything. I'm sure I had a perfect memory before I was transported, but I can't remember now."

David Starkey, a member of the University of Leicester team, said: "We decided to investigate the practicalities of teleportation as a means of everyday travel.

"We employed several approximations to determine the amount of data required in bits to fully store a human genetic code and neural information, and the signal to noise ratio of typical signalling equipment.

"Our results indicate the time scales to complete a full teleport of an individual are a little too lengthy at this time. Current means of travel remain more feasible."

The students, all in their final year of a Master of Physics degree, worked out what it would take to represent a human as transferable data.

They found that the energy required to teleport into orbit was dependent on bandwidth. The less time it took, the more power was consumed.

The universe is thought to be abound 14 billion years old. Beaming someone up to an orbiting spacecraft would take about 350,000 times longer than all the years that have passed since the Big Bang, using the limitations of bandwidth speeds available today. The findings are published in the University of Leicester's Journal of Physics Special Topics.

So Star Trek teleportation in addition to consuming incredible amounts of power requires unbelievable bandwidths and transmission speeds that would make even the current gigabit Internet providers pale by comparison. It's like comparing the speed of a tortoise to the warp speed of the Enterprise - only you'd have to be much faster.

Oh well, I guess we'll just have to rely on worm holes.