Nano, by Saad

Spurred by the news that former President Bush will be the featured speaker at a motivational seminar next week, Slate published a collection of public speaking advice for Bush from different motivational speakers (which was a moderately interesting read).  But it got me thinking…

Opinions of political leaders span the entire spectrum between loved and hated, but most people would agree that President Obama has public speaking skills superior to Bush’s.  Now, imagine if Bush were as eloquent as Obama.  Depending on your opinion of Bush, you might ask:

• What else could he have persuaded America and its allies to stick their noses into, that he couldn’t do with fear mongering alone?  Or…
• What other greatness could he have achieved by motivating people to action by appealing to their aspirations, rather than their (there it is, again) fears?

Fyi, the Slate article containing the public speaking advice is here.

The future is now, at least when it comes to flexible circuit materials in consumer electronics.  Mark Anderson of IEEE Spectrum visited the new Plastic Logic cleanroom in Germany, where a 7-millimeter thin competitor to the Amazon Kindle will be produced.  Here is one reason why plastic electronics will be a major player:

In his corner office at the Dresden facility, Konrad Herre, Plastic Logic’s vice president of manufacturing, gave a simple demonstration highlighting one benefit of plastic electronics.  “You easily can do this,” he says as he smashes his fist onto the Reader’s 22-by-28-centimeter flexible screen and backplane, bashing it with a force that would shatter any liquid-crystal display or slice of silicon. “It doesn’t break, although it’s a big display.”

Besides offering the toughness that a brittle material like silicon does not, the polymer circuitry can be deposited and patterned much more rapidly and with less complex equipment than the metal wires and oxide layers used in conventional fabrication.  Of course, speed is sacrificed when going from silicon transistors to organic transistors, but for an application like the E-reader, delivering a product with toughness at low cost should take precedence.

The cleanroom photograph provided by the story shows nothing unusual but I would love to visit the facility to see these in action:

Perhaps most immediately conspicuous about Plastic Logic’s clean room is the fleet of boxy automatic guided vehicles (AGVs)—robots that lead each motherglass through some 55 of the approximately 80 steps it takes to make the Reader’s display module. Each AGV serves as the robotic shepherd that brings its batch of motherglass from automated station to automated station. And whenever the AGVs are in motion—down “the Autobahn,” as the workers call the clean room’s main drag—the robots play bleepy melodies that warn workers to stand clear.

If we had these back at Hopkins, when I was making microfluidics for an Instrumentation class project, I would have programmed them to whistle the tune I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.