Science Ain't So Bad

Science Guy Out Of Office?

APPLIED SCIENCE

Has Google taken away his  Internet license?

Is he being held in a state institution for the criminally inane?

Where IS MISTER ScienceAintSoBad?

Readers complained. You don’t start a blog and then just turn out the lights  Where the HELL you been?

Hel-lo?

Irresponsible!

I have been reamed out for not keeping up my end of the deal. I know that I am supposed to update regularly and I feel bad about it. I do. But, here’s the thing. We are buying a place. Three bedrooms, three bathrooms. Nice kitchen. Honking big basement. This is a big, big house. By our standards.

And the huge house  needs fixing up. Lots of it. So we made me the “general contractor”.

I have a clip board.

And each day, I walk around behind the electricians and plumbers and carpenters and tin knockers looking official.

What are we doing today? I ask.

Staying out of our way, they say.

We have smart friends who suggest things. I write them down and add them to the drawings. Sometimes I argue a little. Just to show I’m paying attention.  Mostly I do the calling, coordinating, checking, and making sure  the door is unlocked in the morning. It doesn’t take a genius.

But it does take a lot of time.

I manage to keep up on  the scientific literature and I fantasize about actually updating my neglected blog. This (if I tap “publish”) will be the first time I actually pumped one out since construction started.

I will be back on my regular beat soon; I promise.  A few weeks. In the meantime, here’s something to chew on.

GOOGLE PLAY READER

A little thing. From Google. Not a secret, exactly. But you never heard of it.

Very cool!

If you like to keep up on specific stuff like – I dunno – architecture, or book collecting, or phrenology (that’s head bumps and I’m just being funny) you can “subscribe” to some “feeds”, using an rss “reader” such as Google reader.  But if you just want to have fun surfing the feeds, Type www. google.com/reader/play. Very hard to put down. You’ll see what I mean.

GOOGLE PLAY READER IN ACTION

A RADICAL STEP FOR SMARTPHONES

My Galaxy Nexus phone is 12 months old.

A senior citizen of a phone.

It still does great tricks, takes decent pictures, and keeps me connected. And with the help of my graying pal there, I tap out this article, waiting in  the doctor’s office  for my name to be called. What more could I ask from my pocket slab? Am I getting restless for a better phone? Do I need an upgrade?

The rush to the future has slowed. Are smartphones  amazing? For sure. But in the world of “what have you done for me lately”, higher screen resolution, faster processors, and a few more more pixels won’t make me rush to the store for a new phone.  My Galaxy Nexus is as good as the newest stuff in most ways. I don’t feel so bad when I walk by the kiosk. Nothing there makes me drool.

Maybe this will.

How about a smartphone with a battery that lasts for days?  And a great display that you can drop without damage, that won’t scratch and – seriously – that can be bent and twisted.

See? I got your attention.

Phone displays are the next big thing. Instead of glass, they will soon become unscratchable, unbreakable plastic with amazing clarity. Most important of all, the display, instead of sucking the battery dry, will help to conserve energy, finally allowing you to focus on  something beside how long it’s been since the last charge.

The new OLED displays will bend easily so that they can be folded up like a piece of paper while still functioning.  Star Trek had great tricorders for beaming Scotty up. But they couldn’t bend and twist..

Here’s the thing. According to Mathew Humphries of geek.com,   Dai Nippon Printing already has the thing working. They say this technology has been licensed to Samsung. MISTER ScienceAintSoBad thinks the first phones will be announced next month.

Don’t say I never told you nothin’.

Now. Back to the house project.

See ya.

Scary!

THOSE BIG PHONES

” Zoey” asked about screen size for smartphones. They’re getting so big. Why?

I said:

Phones started out small.

Apple made a big thing about how dainty the IPhone was. But, as people have come to expect more from their phones, small has become less cute and more aggravating. How are you going to read a book, watch a movie, or edit a document? With a magnifying glass?

So  there’s been some “size drift”.

It’s true you can add a tablet to your electronics collection – something like the very nice IPad.  But some people don’t want to have a permanent forward lean like a school kid with a backpack full of gadgets. Maybe bigger phones will  take pressure off of your need for multiple electronics, multiple accounts, and multiple charging technologies .

Saves money too, right?

We don’t know what is the best size for a smartphone yet. This is an experiment. We’re figuring this out together.

I thought you should know.

—————
Thanks to David Baldinger for the cartoon figure used in the above image. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Implications

SEMICONDUCTOR TECHNOLOGY: Cheap, bright, and disposable.

ORGANIC LIGHT-EMITTING ELECTROCHEMICAL CELLS

I’ve never been a big fan of light coming from walls. Too much pressure on the dust devils.

But ACS Nano describes a new kind of light source made from graphene which consists of sheets of ultra efficient lighting material for displays and glowing walls and whatnot.

It makes it sound like the current hot technology for plastic displays, OLED, (have you even heard of it yet?) is old before its time.

Cheap, recyclable, and highly efficient, Organic Light – Emitting Electrochemical Cells ( LEC’s) sound fine but, having read one too many articles about big breakthroughs followed by deep and long lasting silence, MISTER ScienceAinSoBad is becoming a bit jaundiced. We’ll spare this fascinating tease a ScienceAintSoBadRAting = 7 until it shows itself to be a game changer.