Joe wrote:

The good old Tricorder! How's this for folk etymology?

I meant that literally, not figuratively. Wikipedia describes the fictional Star Trek tricorder as ``a multifunction handheld device used for sensor scanning, data analysis, and recording data. . . . The word "tricorder" is a portmanteau of "tri-" and "recorder", referring to the device's three default scanning functions: GEO (geological), MET (meteorological), and BIO (biological)." It is reasonable to foresee that in our increasing paranoid country that in the near future 5G or 6G phones like include sensors for detecting and recording the presence of radiation, explosive an biological hazards. For medicine, they will incorporate a medical app and sensor that records and monitor's the owner's health, or for older persons, alert medical providers or EMT providers to a pending heart attack or diabetic loss of consciousness. Continuously running mini-cam analysis of persons in your immediate vicinity, coupled with face recognition software and internet databases, will alert you to the presence of nearby persons with felony or child abuse criminal histories or people wearing parole digital tracking leg bands. For meteorology, instead of just displaying weather maps, they will incorporate weather sensors that when coupled to online weather warning systems will alert you in terms of real time meter distances of approaching high-wind squall lines. For geology, incorporated motion and low-frequency sound sensors, coupled to internet regional earthquake warning systems, will alert you to approaching earthquake ground waves, thus giving the user valuable life-safe second lead times to take cover or exit a building. (I believe I saw on a recent PBS NOVA that researchers are already experimenting with this last idea in the earthquake prone Bay Area.) At the very least, I can sell the preceding paragraph to _Discover_ magazine or _Popular Mechanics_. -:) Clear Skies - Kurt