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.)
Stupidity kills
Early in the morning on New Year’s Day, at a party south of Seattle, several people were handing their guns around, playing show-and-tell. One person asked to see a gun, then refused to give it back. A fight broke out. Shots were fired. Four people were injured, and three fled the scene.
People outside the Seattle area might never have heard about this party, except that what happened next made the national news.
One of the gun owners, Benjamin Barnes, apparently decided he needed to hide out for a while. So he loaded up his car with survival gear and drove to Mt. Rainier National Park. He sped through a checkpoint — just a routine check for tire chains, nothing to do with him. Park Rangers pursued. Another Ranger, Margaret Anderson, pulled her patrol car across the road ahead of him.
When Barnes encountered the roadblock, he jumped out of his car and started shooting. The weapon was later identified as an assault rifle with armor-piercing ammunition. Anderson was shot and killed before she got out of the vehicle. The pursuing car was hit, too, but the Ranger driving it retreated, uninjured.
Barnes fled into the snow-covered woods, apparently leaving most of his gear in the car. A massive manhunt ensued. The next day, Barnes was found face down in a creek, wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and one tennis shoe. He drowned, with hypothermia a contributing cause.
Lots of people have tried to tie this tragedy to their own political agendas. But it’s not about gun possession in National Parks, or Iraq veterans with PTSD. It all started in good fun, a bunch of happy people showing off their toys.
But loaded guns aren’t toys. Alcohol and guns, like alcohol and cars, are a stupidly dangerous mix. Don’t go there. Please.
My brother is a Park Ranger. I won’t shed any tears for Benjamin Barnes. My heart does go out to his family, and to Margaret Anderson’s family, and to everyone affected by this terrible, stupid waste.
Ranger Anderson is survived by her husband and two young daughters. Information about the memorial fund is here.
This is not a gun control post or a political post. Any comments on those subjects are off-topic and will be removed.
Part of a very cool collection of nearly a thousand WPA posters at the Library of Congress. I’d seen a number of individual posters before, but I hadn’t seen the whole collection in one place.
