My dental health center moved to new offices recently.  It’s a much nicer space, with natural lighting, more treatment areas, and all new equipment.  Instead of the posters of kittens my childhood dentist had tacked to the ceiling, for example, there’s now a flat-screen monitor hanging over the chair, cycling through serene images.

In taking all this in, I began to fixate on the fact that the new X-ray gun has a USB port, and I cannot fathom why.  Sure, an X-ray detector that connects to a computer is commonplace now, but that connects to a computer, not the X-ray machine.  The “gun” just shoots X-radiation.  That’s its job.  You tell it how much you want, and it delivers it.  It doesn’t much care what happens once the radiation leaves the tube.  So why would it need a USB port?

There’s a long history of advertising products by counting things that don’t matter.When transistor radios first came out, manufacturers loved marketing how many transistors they had. Technically you only needed one to make a radio, and you could put five or six to good use, but after that you were just cramming them in there for sport. It looks great in ads, though: 14-transistor radios! Those must sound amazing!

Intel advertised microchips the same way. The 1.8 GHz processor was better than the 1.7 GHz processor because it had more gigahertzes. (It scares me that Firefox thinks “gigahertzes” is a properly-spelled word.) The fact that AMD could make faster chips at slower clock speeds tended not to bother the numbers-obsessed consumer.

Gillette kicked off perhaps the strangest counting war when it added a couple extra blades to its safety razor to create the Mach3.  Men everywhere instantly recognized how much better the shaving experience must be with three blades.  I was too smart to fall for that.  I’ve instead spent a small fortune on Schick Quattro cartridges.  I happen to know that it’s a much better razor: it’s got four blades.  I have absolutely no idea what the extra blades do, exactly, but I’m certain I’d be a scruffy mess without them.  Today, we even have the Gillette Fusion Power, which incorporates six blades (one on the back) and a microchip.  Again, the marketing material doesn’t make entirely clear what the microchip does, but we can all agree: the more transistors a razor has, the closer the shave!

My favorite counting game is still with cheeses.  I enjoyed a great three-cheese pasta dish some years ago.  Some time later I had a great four-cheese lasagna, and later still I ordered a delicious five-cheese pizza.  Today I can order a six-cheese dish from several different restaurants.  And do you know what I reply when a server sets down a plate of six-cheese pasta and asks, “Would you care for some freshly grated Parmesan?”  I say, “Yes!”  Who wouldn’t want seven cheeses at once?

So I have to ask: with all this counting of superfluous components, did they just put a USB port on the X-ray machine ’cause stuff works better when it has more USB ports on it?