Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for August 30, 2018

From King Harald’s gums, of course.

First you have to get the devices in the mood.

I think this is a good time to mention Neil Postman’s “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology.” Immediately after his “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business,” it’s my favorite Postman work.

And who is Janis pairing with in panel 4?

Got an iPhone?

There’s your problem.

Almost everything I use is wired. 100% reliable and hard to hack.

I don’t get today’s strip. Did the pairing fail because Janis is using the wireless to look up “bluetooth”? Or is she looking up bluetooth as a result of Arlo’s frustration with the digital assistant? If it’s the latter, what’s the joke?

https://youtu.be/VdmQp9M9jUo

The name “Bluetooth” is an Anglicised version of the Scandinavian Blåtand/Blåtann (Old Norse blátǫnn), the epithet of the tenth-century king Harald Bluetooth who united dissonant Danish tribes into a single kingdom. The implication is that Bluetooth unites communication protocols.

The idea of this name was proposed in 1997 by Jim Kardach of Intel who developed a system that would allow mobile phones to communicate with computers. At the time of this proposal he was reading Frans G. Bengtsson’s historical novel The Long Ships about Vikings and King Harald BluetoothThe Bluetooth logo is a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes Runic letter ior.svg (Hagall) (ᚼ) and Runic letter berkanan.svg (Bjarkan) (ᛒ), Harald’s initials.

I am Furious, Blue…

I’ve long wanted a Bluetooth device that doesn’t work. That way, when people see it, they think I’m having a conversation instead of just randomly talking to myself.

Interesting facts that you probably knew but I didn’t know you knew them:

For a long time the useful applications for Bluetooth were not obvious, aside from making headphones wireless. Today there are quite a few uses that have been developed. One of the more unusual is the driving time estimates along highways. Sensors placed along busy roads will sample anonymous Bluetooth signals from passing cars and temporarily save their unique signatures. A few miles/km down the road they will try to “hear” the same signal and compute the speed the cars are going, allowing electronic signs to alert motorists of the time required to get to a further likely waypoint, such as a city, bridge, airport, etc.

The guy who invented it did have a rare tooth condition that caused a bluish color, though not that bad, on his teeth. When asking his colleagues about what he should name the new frequency he’d discovered they jokingly said Bluetooth and well the rest is history.

Bluetooth often elicits a “blue streak.”

Bluetooth often elicits a “blue streak.”