It sounds cool.  Northrop Grumman, makers of many fine military technologies, has delivered the first production-line quality laser ray gun to the United States Air Force.  A fine achievement indeed.

At first glance anyway.

The Joint High Power Solid State Laser program is intended to one day deliver a 100 kilowatt cannon capable of all sorts of cool things.  Only it has yet to deliver a final end product, as the production of the electricity to power such a laser gun in any sort of mobile platform involves extremely hazardous chemicals.

So insetad of delivering that, we get the Vesta II, a teeny tiny little 15 kW laser. It’s hard to even classify it as a weapon, in that about all it can really do is hurt a lot or maybe, with enough time, explode exposed explosives.  (Say that ten times fast.)

Still, that we’ve got a production-line quality laser “weapon” at all is a huge step forward … I guess.  I mean it’s better than, say, not having any production-line quality ray guns for our military to play with.  I guess it at least allows all sorts of testing and design and consideration to be done.  It’s a step along the way to something cool, even if it’s kind of a letdown itself.

In a time when national financial stability is so questionable though, it could be the wrong time to trumpet any project that fails to deliver bang for the buck.

I don’t get it. With all of this great technology that we have today, the best solution I have for taking hair off of my face is to hack it off with a blade?

If there’s one area where technology is growing painfully slow, it’s the department of regular hair removal. We have waxing (Which is how old?), shaving (Again … positively prehistoric!), and the decades old chemically burning yourself (And it never even works!). Oh, sure, razors buzz like sexual aids now to help … umm … somehow? And we throw more and more blades into them. Yipee? While electric shavers pretty much just continue along their same old principles. All they do is get easier to clean. They still don’t actually shave any better. And so on and so forth. What has technology really made better here?

Meanwhile in the realm of “permanent” we have the new fad: laser hair removal. Which sounds cool … but has some limitations. There’s the skin tone vs. hair color problems where the computer simply can’t “see” the hairs to laser them. It takes like six or more sessions, weeks in between to heal, and even then is usually only guaranteed to last a year or so. And what about lasering those very intimate parts with lots of soft folding tissue? Some people want to get rid of hair there too. And let’s not forget that price!

So what about a daily (or so) razor, that uses lasers? Being a “daily” device, it doesn’t have to burn down into each hair follicle like laser hair removal does. You’re not “permanently” removing hair. You’re just shaving. Hair burns so easily. Surely there must be a temperature at which hair burns but skin doesn’t. Surely there must be a way to monitor temperatures for safety. Surely there must be a way for technology to step in and bring shaving into the new millennium. Surely?

I want my Star Trek laser razor dammit! Make it so.