Think this isn't an issue? There was a recent story about Dick Cheney, the beloved U.S. vice-president, asking a reporter to unplug his laptop on-board a flight so that he may charge his iPod. Apparently, another reporter on-board had his laptop charged up enough to be able to write the story. Slow news day or not, it does serve to illustrate how dependent we all have become to these plastic-coated wires. It also shows how clever Dick Cheney really is, because with this simple little bit of rudeness, there was one more story in the papers about iPods, and one less story about how many Iraqis were killed to save everyone from imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction.

I have a portable CD player that transmits sounds to any FM radio within a few metre radius, the idea being that if your car or portable radio doesn't have a CD player, you can just place this unit nearby, tune the radio to a free station and hear your CD through the speakers. Of course, it also came with a dangly pair of headphones and a corded charger. Who would expect anything less for something claiming to be wireless? But what I wasn't expecting in the box was yet one more wire. At first, I thought it was a mistake - it had a headphone jack on one end and on the other end, it had nothing. It just ended. Perhaps a broken headphone somehow got packaged into the box, I thought. I cast it aside and leafed through the instructions and guess what? That weird wire was listed in the "parts" photo. But why? Well, it turns out it's the antenna. So, to save myself the tangles of a cassette adaptor cord, I have now replaced it with a new and improved cordless transmitting cord. Instead of a cord dangling out of my cassette player, I have a cord dangling onto the floor. Much more civilized and "21st century" isn't it?

With this kind of progress, I expect future shuttle missions to have long cords involved. Can you imagine a shuttle blasting off with a long cord trailing out behind it? Can you imagine it being so long that it reaches from the Earth right out into space? You think that's silly? Well, guess again. NASA is actually trying to do this. No, really. They're calling it a Space Elevator. The idea is to have a great big long cord stretched out so far that it reaches space. And then, once you have that, you can just bring satellites up this cord until they reach space, and then set them free to circle the Earth. No more shuttles or rockets required. And I guess once they get this working, they'll want to build some more. Oh well. Cords are already part of our landscape, with all the wires strung around carrying electricity, phone, cable and internet services, so why not add some Space Elevator cords to the scenery?