A few podcasts ago I told James the result of a baseball match before the match had finished in his timezone. For those of us who live in the future, in places like Australia and New Zealand, we're obligated to be sensitive to the time differentials of those less future-blessed than ourselves.

All school kids are taught the importance of temporal sensitivity at a young age so that it is ingrained in to our culture. However, sometimes people make mistakes, like myself, and we have to have a refresher course.

This time the course had new material so it was quite interesting - they were discussing the evolution of telecommunications in trans-temporal travel - ie: flying from the USA to Australia or back the other way.

When we fly from Australia to the USA, our phone conversations are done with a giant buffering system. The phone conversations are already copied to the plane as we fly and the responses we send are sent back to Australia in the future to be pasted together to make the conversation complete.

It was interesting from a historical point of view - in that it took a long time for phones to even appear in planes. In fact, for many years mobile phones have been banned in planes too. The reason for this is that the technology to traverse the conversation with the present and the past just didn't exist.

The same problem existed until recently with mobile phones. They work on a non-fixed line system, such that they talk to satellites. Satellites have an interesting time-drag phenomenon originally misunderstood by Albert Einstein has relativity.

In short, because the objects are traveling around the Earth at immense speed, they travel through time more slowly - well, that's one interpretation. The official Australia interpretation involves, drag, boomerangs and folds in time's time... but you'll catch up to that stuff later in your future - for now we'll just stick with Einsteins kindergarten explanation.

So until recently, we weren't able to capture conversations in trans-temporal travel in any easy way.. so mobile phones were simply banned. But science has come to the rescue again and shortly we'll start to see planes that capture the mobile phone signal on a local antenna and filter the conversation through the regular trans-temporal phone system. Brilliant. Kudos to the great time travel engineers who worked on this.

Don't expect to see this stuff every where at once - it'll take a big of money to upgrade all the plane infrastructure to handle this new technology.. but in the next 10 years or so I'm sure we'll see this become the norm.