On this date in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation establishing Rocky Mountain National Park. This living showcase of the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, with elevations ranging from 8,000 feet in the wet, grassy valleys to 14,259 feet at the weather-ravaged top of Longs Peak, provides visitors with opportunities for countless breathtaking experiences and adventures.
Photo: Ann Schonlau - National Park Service
Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of Economic Change in 1 Graph
The Atlantic offers a very clear summary of the transformation of the US economy over the last 60 years, from manufacturing and agriculture-oriented to finance and service-oriented. Unfortunately, the graph also demonstrates how difficult reversing the trend is likely to be: it has much deeper causes than, say, China’s trade practices and lack of worker protections.
White-collar work of all kinds now accounts for nearly half of GDP, while manufacturing is just one-ninth.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Supreme Court: Police need warrant to use GPS tracking on cars - latimes.com
Good for the Supreme Court. It held — unanimously — that GPS tracking is a “search” under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and therefore requires a warrant.
Snow is so unusual here in Seattle that even the trees bundle up…
Actually, the tree sweaters are a pre-existing project by local artist Suzanne Tidwell. But they did come in handy today.
India marks milestone in fight against polio | ajc.com
I belong to one of the last generations to be vaccinated against smallpox, which was declared eradicated in 1980. There’s now hope that kids born today may be among the last to need vaccinations against polio.
Cool: Dragging an image to Google’s Search by Image tool to do a quick search for the original source.
Uncool: Finding that five different sites used the same image, but none included a photo credit.
If you have a smartphone or tablet, there’s a good chance it uses Gorilla Glass. With a breaking load of more than 120 pounds, the glass will probably survive anything the device can. So Corning is justifiably proud of Gorilla Glass 2, with similar toughness and a 20% thickness reduction.
EBN - OLED Finally Hits the Big Screen - Literally
One of the big announcements at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show was a jumbo-sized OLED display from LG Electronics. Still a ways to go before we see a jumbo-sized OLED that people can actually afford.
To answer a few questions posed by comments to the above article:
- OLEDs are “organic” in the chemical sense, because the emissive materials are carbon-based polymers. There’s nothing particularly “green” about the materials used.
- Two major contributors to cost are the silicon backplane electronics — which are very similar to the backplanes used for LCDs — and the emissive polymers, which are very expensive and proprietary and only starting to be available in large volumes.
- The terms OLED and AMOLED are often used interchangeably. “AM” refers to the active matrix driver electronics, which are generally faster than alternatives and work better for larger displays.
(Insert snarky comment about the EBN editor’s understanding of this technology here.)
