Granite Geek Archives

January 1, 2011

Changes at the Telegraph

As a long term subscriber, I won't see a difference as we pick it up out of our box. But I'll be thinking of the slow (quick?) changes in the way I receive information every day. Reading the paper, holding it in my hands involves more than just reading. The sensory input of my fingers, feeling the paper, the noisy crinkle as I flip to another page, the smell of fresh ink and newsprint, even the short time memory of my journey out to the street to retrieve my own copy all add up to a feeling of satisfaction.

Even after reading, the paper has more uses. I take individual sheets and cover the cat who wants to hide and play tiger in the forest. Since we have a wood stove, I save papers to start the fire when I've let it burn out to empty ashes. We use newspaper as mulch in the spring to jumpstart tender seedlings. We crinkle up newspapers as packing for tender items.

All these secondary uses come to us on newsprint as they have for hundreds of years. Digital media seems so bland and unattached to our normal lives. We scroll the pages on the screen and they disappear into the aether. like a ghost who has no real affect on our physical being, only a suggestion of meaning that once seen, remains to us as only a memory of visual content. A single and passive input to our senses. I like computers, I can hardly conceive of what my life would be like without the internet and email. Still, I subscribe to the Telegraph and magazines because paper is real. The Telegraph and all the people are real and substantial. When I pick up the paper, I know that there are lines of people behind it who worked and thought and collabrated and made my life happier.

The ratcheting down of newspapers across the nation makes me uneasy. Talented reporters and staff are stressed. Stability and job security are a thing of the past. As a reader, I'm stressed because my news delivery service is being changed to something I don't enjoy nearly as much. I've had years of depending on daily updates from my favorite newspaper and that is threatened. Does reading the Huffington Post diminish the survival of my paper? Probably not, but I certainly don't want that or other internet news services to be my only remain choice.

The Telegraph is doing all it can to hold on. We loyal patrons who remain paid subscribers want it to continue forever, or at least until we make that final phase change ourselves.

January 2, 2011

Coal power in U.S. - 'a dead man walking'?

The Washington Post has a piece today (read it here) on the future of coal-fired electricity in the U.S. that examines it largely from a financial standpoint and concludes that as things currently stand, little or no new coal-fired power is likely to be built., That's partly because of the increased costs of environmental regulation of coal, which is the dirtiest of major fuels by most measurements, and partly because of the cost advantages of natural gas.

"When we do need new capacity, it is highly likely that we will look to natural gas plants instead of coal, especially if natural gas prices remain as low as projected," says (one energy executive). "The plants are less expensive to build, and current forward price projections favor gas over coal."

We talk about coal a lot in New Hampshire, thanks to the 460-MW Merrimack Station plant in Bow, but the Granite Ridge natural gas plant in Londonderry (owned by energy giant AES) is actually bigger (750 MW). NH uses more natural gas than coal, overall (2005 figures showed natural gas at 16 percent of total energy use, coal was 10%, according to the state; nuclear was 22%) As the state Public Utilities Commission notes, natural gas is a big and growing player: "Gas-fired electric generation in New England accounted for less than 1% of its electric supply in 1980; however, today it accounts for over 41% and is expected to increase to 49% by 2010."

January 3, 2011

Boston sends water through turbines en route from reservoir

This seems like an obvious idea, but one in which the finances might be tough to justify up front: The Massachusetts Water Reserve Authority has installed turbines in some pipes that feed water by gravity from the Quabbin Reservoir, getting 1.2 million kilowatt-hours* a year from the system (110 homes worth of power, by Mass. calculations). It's basically a small hydropower plant in a man-made rapids. Globe story is here.

If it works as planned they'll save $150,000 a year, which means a roughly 15-year payback on the $1.8 million system.

* OK, so I originally left out the "million" ...

January 4, 2011

MIT is turning 150, and its museum will shine

The MIT Museum has been refurbished and will reopen this weekend, part of a bunch of celebrations about the school turning 150. Among the items that will be on display: the world's first pocket-sized scientific calculator (1972); wind tunnel models that helped determine the cause of the John Hancock Tower's window failure (1970s); MIT-Harvard merger petitions (1904); recordings from an (impromptu) Grateful Dead concert at MIT (1970).

Here's the press information; the museum show will be on display all year.

I'm not sure if they'll have any of their most famous display, of various MIT hacks - including the fake cop car that was placed on top of the MIT Dome. I covered that show years ago.

Spontaneous combustion - the real kind (unfortunately)

The term "spontaneous combustion" in news reports usually refers to the unsubstantiated idea that people sometimes burst into flame and burn up for no obvious reason. Here's a SCICOP article about this myth.

The Concord Monitor has a story today about real spontaneous combustion, however: A pile of oily rags burst into flame and burned down a restaurant. (Read the story here.) Along with grain/wood dust exploding, a topic I discussed a couple of weeks ago, that's the main cause of flame appearing out of nowhere. This explainer is from a Cornell Material Science site (here):

People working around the house often get rags full of stuff like paint thinner, varnish, or cleaner for car engine parts on them. This stuff burns like crazy. When a rag is soaked with oily materials, the liquids evaporate and fill spaces like basements and trash cans with fumes: fumes that can burn. Fires start when the fumes get hot. The sun might beat down. Or, a downstairs refrigerator might come on, and the electric motor inside might make just enough of a spark to start the whole place burning.

You can see it really isn't completely spontaneous, since some external energy is required. But not very much.

Oily rags should be stored in a sealed container or in water, in well-ventilated spots, or laid out flat (not bunched up) to dry.

January 5, 2011

$10 million of 'torture, harassment and bodily harm' from cell towers

This item ran on The Lobby, a business/politics news site run by the Telegraph, and I probably shouldn't reprint it because we charge subscribers money to see that service - but doggone it, I can't resist:

Bruce Loudenslager, a Goffstown resident, is suing Clear Channel radio stations, WMUR-TV and Citadel Broadcasting for "torture, harassment and bodily harm from the continuous use of radio frequency and/or microwave targeting." After reading up on the matter, Loudenslager concluded that "these devices are capable of serious bodily harm, death, and can be classed as a deadly weapon." Loudenslager is asking for $10 million in damages. Included in the filing a printout from www.us-government-torture.com, offering links to methods to "neutralize the electronic attacks carried out with exotic delivery methods using transmitters for large population areas, implantable microchips and directed energy." The effects of the "super-secret" government program "to eliminate opposition" are to "reduce the brain's essential chemistry gradually without the target being aware." And you thought only campaign ads did that.

Discovery Center: 'Astro-photography 101â²

Taking pictures of the night sky is harder than it sounds, and few of us will ever be able to take photos like a mind-boggling shot of the ISS in front of the sun during a solar eclipse (check it here). But there is help at hand at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center on Friday, during its weekly Super Stellar Friday event. New Hampshire Astronomical Society astrophotographer Gardner Gerry will show what equipment to use and how to use it. Participants can bring their camera and test the tips. There will also be a free Skywatch program outside with telescope advice and help.

The program starts at 7 p.m. As always, it's recommended for ages above age 8, and those under 13 must be accompanied by an adult. Cost is $9 adults, $8 seniors & students, $6 children.

Here's the story from TreeHugger.

Even a coal-fired-power-plant-powered electric car is good

Nothing local this morning, so I'll link to this story, which discusses a Swiss life-cycle analysis of electric and gas-powered cars. The conclusion: From soup to nuts, including the impact of making those big batteries, even an electric car that gets its juice from a nasty coal-fired plant is equivalent to a conventional car that gets 45 mpg. If it gets power solely from windmills or solar panels (not that any do, of course) the equivalent is 117 mpg. Not bad.

January 6, 2011

GPS-enabled coyotes control rats and mice in Chicago

Via Braniac, I learned that Chicago puts GPS units on wild coyotes that now live in the city, to study their habits. One finding: They're pretty good at controlling rats and other vermin.

Here's the Braniac piece. A quote:

It's looking as though residents will end up adapting, too. They have no choice: It's impossible, in the end, to run the coyotes out of town. Although troublesome individuals can be relocated or put down, wholesale removal of a whole group just opens up the territory for new coyotes. Anyway, the coyotes usually keep out of sight. The project has revealed that they're more comfortable with urban life than one would have thought.

We're practically a snow desert this year

My daughter and I went skiing today, up at Loon in the White Mountains. Boy, is that a gigantic place; I swear some of the runs are wider than runs at Pat's Peak are tall. But also boy, is the North Country hurting for snow - Loon has been making snow like crazy but none of the tree-skiing runs are open because there's so little natural snow, and a couple of its steeper runs were closed so that (presumably, anyway) relatively sparse weekday crowds wouldn't hurt them for the weekend throngs. The recent habit of big storms traveling south of NH is getting to be annoying.

Weirdly, I somehow smashed my left big toe, which is blue, swollen and throbbing. How do you hurt a toe when it's encased inside a tough, sold ski boot, I wonder? I never hit it or ran into anything ...

January 7, 2011

Predator insect shows signs of success against wooly adelgid

The Associated Press has a story (here's the version in the Portland paper) saying that tests of a beetle called Laricobius nigrinus show it to be relatively successful in reducing wooly adelgid populations in New England, perhaps protecting out hemlock population. Not much detail in the story, but it sounds optimistic.

Here's a story from 2009 about Cornell researchers releasing the bugs, which are native to the Pacific Northwest.

January 8, 2011

U.S.: Many of us get too much fluoride

I have long been critical of people who oppose fluoridation of public water supplies, but it seems I am at least partly wrong. In a surprising turnaround, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is agreeing with one of the critics' main points, and is calling for a reduction in some fluoridation levels "because of its presence not just in drinking water but in toothpaste, mouthwash and other products, causing splotches on children's teeth and perhaps more serious problems."

Read an AP story here.

Note that the US isn't saying we should stop adding fluoride to drinking water supplies, only that we should add less of it. Still, that's an amazing change, and is sure to fire up the whole debate.

Here are NH communities that fluoridate. (Note that the vast majority of the states 240-some-odd communities don't have a public water supply, and so can't add it. The biggest place with public water that's not on this list is Nashua):

-Manchester
-Concord
-Portsmouth
-Hanover
-Lebanon
-Lancaster
-Dover
-Durham
-Laconia
-Madbury
-Rochester

January 9, 2011

Creating a Wikipedia article to celebrate the 10th anniversary

Wikipedia

This is what it looked like 12 hours after being created as a single sentence.

This coming Friday is Wikipedia's 10th anniversary. To mark it, I have an article in the Telegraph today (read it here, accompanied by a video that is currently screwed up, so that the voice-over doesn't match the screen grabs ... ) explaining the process.

The article is about Greeley Park, Nashua: This is it.

January 10, 2011

UNH helps sequence strawberry genome

From UNH News Service: An international team of researchers, including several from the University of New Hampshire, have completed the first DNA sequence of any strawberry plant, giving breeders much-needed tools to create tastier, healthier strawberries. Tom Davis, professor of biological sciences at UNH, and postdoctoral researcher Bo Liu were significant contributors to the genome sequence of the woodland strawberry, which was published last month in the journal Nature Genetics.

"We now have a resource for everybody who's interested in strawberry genetics. We can answer questions that before would have been impossible to address," says Davis, who has been working on the strawberry genome project since 2006 as part of the international Strawberry Genome Sequencing Consortium.

For instance, says Davis, breeders can now look at the DNA "fingerprint" of strawberry plants to more easily breed those with enhanced flavor, aroma, or antioxidant properties. Or they could breed more disease-resistant berries, decreasing the significant amount of spraying that cultivated strawberries currently need to thrive and thus enhancing the berry's healthful qualities.

Further, the woodland strawberry is a member of the Rosaceae family, which includes apples, peaches, cherries, raspberries, and almonds, all economically important and popular crops; researchers say the DNA sequence of the strawberry genome will inform the breeding of these other fruits. "We can now begin to understand how evolution works at the level of the genome on this family of plants we all enjoy," says Davis.

The genome sequencing effort, led by researchers at the University of Florida and Virginia Tech, found that the woodland strawberry â Fragaria vesca â has240 million base pairs of DNA (compared to 3 billion for humans), making it one of the smallest genomes of economically significant plants. The consortium focused first on sequencing the wild woodland strawberry because its cultivated cousins, all hybrids, are far more complex.

Building upon prior publications in which he described a one percent genomic sampling of a native New Hampshire wild strawberry, Davis played multiple roles in genome project planning, data interpretation, and manuscript preparation. Liu's unique contribution to this effort was to independently document the locations of specific sequences called ribosomal gene clusters on the chromosomes themselves, using an advanced microscopic technique known as fluorescent in situ hybridization.

The Nature Genetics paper, "The genome of the woodland strawberry," is available here: http://strawberrygenes.unh.edu/Published.740%5B1%5D.pdf.

By coincidence, the complete genomic sequence of another delectable plant species, Theobroma cacao (chocolate), was published in the same journal issue. More information on strawberry genome work at UNH is at strawberrygenes.unh.edu. The UNH component of this work was supported, in part, by the New Hampshire Agricultural Experiment Station and by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (National Research Initiative) Plant Genome program.

Bobcats are returning to the area - for better and worse

My Telegraph column today is about research designed to determine the extent of bobcats' return to New Hampshire, via GPS radio collars and public observation. Read it here - and start looking for bobcat tracks in the snow.

Not everybody is thrilled by this study, as I note: Some fear it's a backhanded way to return a hunting/trapping season on bobcats, which ended in 1988.

January 11, 2011

49 of 50 states have snow on the ground

Hawaii has snow on Mauna Kea - so only Florida is lacking snow on the ground at the moment, says NOAA.

Scroll down on that NOAA page: It notes that Arctic sea ice is way below normal. Weather is a weird thing, eh?

N.H. lawmakers think about killing cap-and-trade

New Hampshire's Republican-dominated legislature - "dominated" is hardly strong enough; the GOP is king and queen of all it surveys in Concord after it swept the state in the last election - is taking a look at whether to continue our participation in the regional carbon cap-and-trade program called RGGI, or Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. New Hampshire Public Radio has a report (you can read the transcript here).

RGGI basically makes electricity producers pay for the right to emit pollution and uses the money to pay for energy efficiency work. It's a 10-state program that was long touted as a model for national cap-and-trade - something that isn't going to happen any time soon. That federal fizzle, combined with the way RGGI prices have collapsed because the recession reducing the short-term need for carbon offsets, has taken some of the wind out of its sails. A few states have already begun raiding RGGI money to offset budget problems.

California, meanwhile, is talking about a cap-and-trade program of its own, which because of the size of that state's economy would have even more oomph than RGGI at its peak.

Verizon iPhone is a great move, or a lousy one

Verizon Wireless is ~~expected to announce today or possibly later this week~~ will start handling iPhones in February. This demonstrates how brilliant Verizon is because they waited for AT&T to show the drawbacks, says Slate, or how not-so-brilliant Verizon is because AT&T has alot of the business tied up already, says AP, or how savvy/desperate Verizon is because it may offer unlimited downloads to lure new customers, says the Wall Street Journal.

And that's enough about that ...

I'm disappointed by our "create-a-Wikipedia-article" attempt

I'm a little disappointed by my call to Nashua readers to create a Wikipedia article in honor of the site's 10th anniversary. It's about Greeley Park in the city, and it's still pretty stubby, as you can see here, showing it at 7 a.m. on Tuesday. I'll have to shake the readership tree a bit, see if I can get more action

January 12, 2011

Discovery Center: Uses of light beams

Super Stellar Friday: "Teen Night: Communication on a Light Beam"
January 14^th @ 7 PM

Explore lasers, light and color. Learn how flat screen TVs produce colored images and how light is used in cancer treatments. This interactive presentation will allow students to actively participate in investigations with light. Dr. Steven J. Davis, Executive Vice President for Applied Sciences at Physical Sciences, Inc., will lead the activities and discussion.

Cost is $9 adults, $8 seniors & students, $6 children.

http://blog.makezine.com/

Millisecond power pulses make for a super de-icer

Dartmouth engineering professor has developed a de-icing system called pulse electro-thermal de-icing that sounds great:

PETD uses a thin, electrically-conductive film applied to the surface of, for example, an airplane or a windshield or almost any other object in need of ice protection. The film is then heated with a milliseconds-long pulse of electricity. The beauty of this method is that only a micrometer-thin layer of ice directly at the ice-material interface is heated without having to heat the bulk of the object to which the ice is stuck. Even in extreme cold, PETD achieves nearly perfect efficiency because neither the object nor the air is heatedâthe heat simply does not have time to propagate into the environment. Just one single pulse of electricity melts the interfacial ice and instantly releases any additional build-up, which then easily slides off. Regular electric pulsing can keep surfaces consistently ice-free while maintaining low overall power consumption.

Here's the site with lots more details. Check out the video showing it de-icing a windshield. I want one!

To raise or not to raise - windshield wipers when you're parked, that is

A couple of winters ago I posted about whether it was a good idea to raise your windshield wipers when you parked your car during a snowstorm (as shown in the file photo here). It garnered a surprising amount of debate, with some folks saying only wimpy losers did it, others saying only ignorant flatlanders didn't do it.

I just left my car in the Telegraph lot with the wipers raised, although with this fluffy snow it may not matter much. It's when you have icy rain that it really helps, I think.

I had 8 1/2 inches at home at 7 a.m., so it looks like we'll easily top a foot before this is done. About time - my ground was half bare!

January 13, 2011

'Call of Duty' gamers hacked medical server to get some free bandwidth

The Union-Leader has a today (read it here) about Scandinavian players of "Call of Duty: Black Ops" who swiped bandwidth from Seacoast Radiology, in the process getting access to the personal information of more than 230,000 patients. No credit card or medical data was breached, or so says Seacoast Radiology.

The Rochester, NH-based firm provides radiology (that is, medical X-ray) services for lots of doctors and hospitals.

Cellulosic biofuel company Mascoma gets a big buy-in

New Hampshire's best bet in the long race to develop biofuel from plant cellulose rather than from plant sugars (e.g., from wood chips instead of corn kernels) is Mascoma Corp., created by a couple of Dartmouth professors, one of whom (Lee Lynd) went to college with me. Mascoma got a lot of attention a couple of years ago but has been bypassed by bigger, higher-profile efforts recently. Company news released today may change that. From the company press release:

Mascoma and Valero Ink Deal to Develop Commercial Cellulosic Ethanol Biorefinery

Lebanon, NH â January 13, 2011: Mascoma Corporation today announced that Valero Energy Corporation, the nation's largest independent oil refiner, has invested in Mascoma Corporation. Further, Mascoma, Valero, and Mascoma's operating subsidiary, Frontier Renewable Resources LLC, jointly owned with natural resource management company, J.M. Longyear LLC, have signed a non-binding letter of intent to support the construction of one of the world's first commercial scale wood-based cellulosic ethanol biorefineries, slated to break ground in 2011 in Kinross Charter Township, Michigan. Under the terms of the letter of intent, Valero would potentially invest up to $50 million of the equity required to finance the project through Frontier Kinross LLC, a subsidiary of Frontier, and would enter into an off-take agreement for the project's ethanol production.

Valero's participation in the project strengthens the financing package for the Kinross biorefinery, complemented with funds from the State of Michigan, through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). As further support of the project, Valero would provide project development and construction oversight services. The biorefinery is planned to have an annual production of 40 million gallons of low-carbon cellulosic ethanol, to be covered by the off-take arrangement with Valero. Frontier will use hardwood pulpwood, which is selectively harvested, naturally regenerated, and is an underutilized, abundant resource in the area surrounding the Kinross biorefinery. Mascoma's 200,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year demonstration facility in Rome, New York, has demonstrated the viability of the technology over the past two years and sets the stage for the commercial facility.

Our snow was was pretty fluffy: 8-1 water/snow ratio

At my house, 16.5 inches of snow fell in yesterday's storm, the first decent one of the winter. I melted it down as part of my CoCoRaHS precipitation-watching duties, and got 2.05 inches of water. Roughly 8-1 ratio, which is pretty average for snow.

I learned from prevous problems to work harder at melting the snow - I put it in the still-warm oven right after dinner. It still good a good hour to melt, though.

January 14, 2011

Have the signs of the Zodiac changed? Of course, and not really

You may have stumbled across some discussion/news lately saying that "scientists" have realized that the signs of the Zodiac are "wrong" - discussions like this one at Salon, which starts out "Yesterday I was a Leo. Today I'm a Cancer" and gets all huffy that mean astronomers have ruined his day.

What happened, it turns out, is that a reporter talked to an astronomer and learned about the precession of the equinoxes - the fact that Earth wobbles in its orbit so that the imaginary figures drawn in the sky called "Zodiac signs" have shifted over the millennia. The sun doesn't pass through the Western Zodiac signs (other cultures draw different pictures in the sky, which tells you something about astrology right there) during the times of year that astrologers pretend it does, and hasn't for a long time. Making an "accurate" zodiac not only changes the time of year for the signs but adds one, called Ophiuchus, that was ignored because it ruined the numerical pattern.

The reporter wrote up this non-news, the item was carried along on the Internet's wave foam, encountered by people who didn't realize this information and/or misunderstood it, and nonsense ensued. It's kind of entertaining, in an exasperating way, to watch humanity waste mental effort on something so incredibly stupid. Here is a discussion from Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame.

I await the news that DNA analysis has shown that the Easter Bunny is actually a groundhog.

January 16, 2011

Our readers-make-a-Wikipedia-article project: Not bad

My week-long project to have Telegraph readers create and improve a new Wikipedia article has ended* and the result is pretty good. You can read my article here or be a lazy news-aggregation-reader and be happy with this paragraph, concerning two of the editors (one from Texas, one from Nashua) who I interviewed:

In the process, they gave a demonstration of the way one of the Internet's weirdest creations â "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit" â has grown to become a gigantic source of often valuable information, despite the fact that all the work is done by a few thousand disorganized volunteers who are scattered around the globe and come and go at will.

*you can continue to edit the article about Greeley Park, of course.

A FIRST robotics parody of "Wizard of Oz" - tonight in Amherst

Tonight the Souhegan FIRST Robotics team has its Comedy Night fundraiser, with three professional comics on the school stage. It starts at 7 p.m. at the high school, and the $20 ticket goes entirely to the robot team.

More importantly, though, is that they'll be preceded by a short skit put on by the team, involving a sort-of-but-not-really musical parody of "Wizard of Oz". Here's a snippet of lyrics - a program team member to the tune of "If I Only Had a Brain":

Â Â Â I could turn bugs into features
Knock the rest into the bleachers
Create a million-line download

Â Â Â A computer over-achiever
Not an extra from 'Leave it to Beaver'
If I only had the code

Last year we did "FIRST Side Story", which among other things featured the robot singing "I Feel Pretty."

January 17, 2011

Does it rain more in NH or in neighboring states?

The national network of precipitation-watching volunteers called CoCoRaHS has compiled state-by-state data from its various volunteer observing stations in 2010. The chart is here, if you want to ponder it.

The part I liked best was the number of days per year that it rained, snowed or sleeted. Each state gets a minimum maximum number, taken from the various stations. Basically, we get precipitation one day out of every three. Here are the results for New Hampshire and its neighboring states:

State / min. - max. days with precipitation in 2010

* NH / 118 - 146 days
* Vt. / 166 - 211 days
* Mass. / 122 - 139 days
* Maine / 110 - 133 days

Overall, it's pretty constant except for Vermont, which comes across as notably grayer and damper than its neighbors.

Note that this data is taken from fewer than 10 stations in each state, since that's the number which reported a "complete water year," not missing any days. Each state has dozens of stations (including me, although I only started in December) but most of us miss the occasional day.

The range can be much greater in other states: Hawaii, which includes what may be the wettest place on Earth, ranges from 37 days of precipitation to 267 of them! Washington state, which has Seattle as well as near-deserts, goes from 44 to 224. The smallest variation I could find was Delaware, which reported between 111 and 125 days of precipitation

As the magnetic pole moves, should airport runways be renamed?

My Telegraph column today asks why no New Hampshire airport runways have had to be renamed in recent memory, even though the magnetic North Pole has moved enough that a runway in Tampa, Fla. had to change its numbers (which indicate the magnetic direction that runways point).

Here's the column, entertaining and brilliantly written as always.

Here's the short answer, for the impatient: The pole hasn't moved enough, and nobody that I could contact knows why Tampa had to change when no other airport did.

January 18, 2011

Climate change made the sun rise earlier! (Not)

Human behavior is changing the climate and causing lots of astonishing stuff to happen, yes - but sometimes folks go overboard. For example, there's a report that climate change made the sun rise two days earlier than expected after the winter dark period in Greenland.

Wow ... CO2 buildup can change the spin of the Earth!

Well, no - obviously. The most likely explanation (as discussed here) is that an unusual ice crystal called pyramidilly-terminated hexagonal prism in the atmospher caused a larger-than-usual halo effect around the sun, which made a just-below-the-horizon sun to be apparently visible. Pretty prosaic, alas.

lthough, come to think of it, maybe excess greenhouse gas changes the likelihood of pyramidilly-terminated hexagonal prism crystals ... in which case, climate change would be the cause! Did I scoff too soon?

Multi-megawatt solar plants keep coming to Mass.

One of the interesting things of maintaining my alternative-power Google Map has been watching the size and number of solar and wind projects grow over time, which means I have slowly been dropping smaller projects that I had added due to lack of alternatives (e.g., the one wind turbine at Jiminy Peak Ski Area; the Brockton Brightfield solar plant in Mass.).

For a long time the region had no solar-power project bigger than about 500 kilowatts, but now the megawatt-level projects are starting to arrive in Massachusetts. The latest plan calls for a 4.2-megawatt plant near Springfield, which would be more than twice the size of New England's biggest PV site. Read the Mass High Tech story here.

t the moment, the North Conway Water Project PV plant (167 kilowatts) is the biggest in N.H. I haven't heard much later about PSNH's idea for a multi-megawatt plant at the Manchester landfill, which was tied up in questions of whether the utility could use some money it pays into a state-controlled renewable energy fund.

Make Blog

One of my frequently visited sites is the Make blog, an assembly of interesting projects that creative people are doing.

I would recommend that all parents let their kids know this is available and give them enough tools to 'bend' circuits, take things apart and build new things from the parts. The latest projects (with video) shows how to make a linear actuator from a deoderant tube. This opens up all sorts of opportunities for cheap robots and little machines.

I wish I had this available to me when I was growing up.

Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH

January 19, 2011

A new invasive fish in NH 'likely introduced by human intervention

A press release from the state:

The state departments of Environmental Services (DES) and Fish and Game announced today the discovery of the rosyside dace (Clinostomus funduloides), a non-native member of the minnow family previously unknown in New Hampshire. The species was found inhabiting Hewes Brook, a tributary of the Connecticut River in Lyme. The discovery was made in summer 2010 by DES biologists during routine biological monitoring activities. The species' identity was recently confirmed by three independent researchers.

"While the origin of this species in New Hampshire is uncertain, it seems likely to have been introduced by human intervention," said David Neils, DES biologist.

At the time of sampling, 85 individuals were captured. However, based on observations, DES biologists estimated the population to be in the hundreds.

"The introduction of aquatic non-native species to New Hampshire waters presents a serious danger to the ecological integrity of our waterways, as well as our ability to enjoy them," stated Thomas Burack, DES Commissioner. New Hampshire laws and administrative rules prohibit the introduction of non-native species. Specifically with regard to fish and wildlife, the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department Administrative Rules control the possession and importation, and prohibit the release of, non-indigenous or non-naturalized fish species to New Hampshire waters. The same rules also prohibit the possession of live fish, other than approved baitfish species when leaving any freshwaters of the state.

"Anglers are unlikely to catch the rosyside dace using hook-and-line because of its small size, but incidental capture is possible by means of baitfish trapping," said Jason Smith, Fish and Game biologist.

Smith recommends that if fish caught are suspected to be the rosyside dace or any other non-native aquatic species previously undocumented in New Hampshire, individuals should immediately release them back into the waters from which they were captured, and contact either the Fish and Game Inland Fisheries Division (603-271-2501) or the DES biology section (603-271-8865).

"There is no indication at this point that the rosyside dace could cause recreational or economic problems; however, ecological impacts to the native fish community are possible depending on the ability of the species to expand its range and successfully propagate," said Glenn Normandeau, Fish and Game Executive Director.

The rosyside dace is a member of the minnow family (Cyprinidae) and typically inhabits small streams with adults ranging from two to four inches in length. Its native distribution is recognized as extending from the Delaware River drainage in Pennsylvania to the Savannah River drainage in Georgia, as well as portions of the Ohio River basin. It is not known to occur in the Connecticut River or its tributaries, other than Hewes Brook, at this time.

For more information, contact David Neils, DES senior biologist, at (603) 271-8865 or david.neils@des.nh.gov .

Today's ice-on-streets factoid: Roadsalt bounces, brine doesn't

Last night's icy rain on top of snow didn't produce the morning commute nightmare I was expecting - although I almost fell three times walking to the car in my own driveway. But this is still the time of year when how to handle ice on roads is big on our winds.

In wandering through news websites I found a story from the Burlington Free-Press discussing Vermont practices. (Read it here) It included two interesting tidbits:

* The effectiveness of road salt goes down dramatically as the temperature goes down. At 30 degrees, for example, a pound of salt would melt 46.3 pounds of ice, while at 10 degrees that same pound would melt just 4.9 pounds of ice.

And this item, concerning the growing practicing of using salt brine on icy/snow roads:

* In the past two years, the state has begun experimenting with brine in northwestern Vermont. ... Dry rock salt bounces when it hits the road surface, and a significant amount can end up outside travel lanes. The agency is still evaluating the benefits of brine versus its cost, Rogers said, but acknowledged, "I'm a big believer in it." He said he expected to bring brine to central Vermont next year.

Lost under the snow: a snow-measuring snowboard

Part of measuring precipitation for the volunteer CoCoRaHS program involves putting out a "snowboard" - a white, flat board. You put it on top of each new snowfall, so that you can measure the amount of the next snowfall. (This CoCoRaHS page explains the process and shows one, which can be just a piece of painted plywood.)

In the training class, they warn you to mark its location, which has to be out in the open away from any obvious markers like trees that might affect snowfall in the spot. I knew where my was, though ... or so I thought.

I just spent 10 minutes busting through the crusted-over 16" of snow (yesterdays' storm ended with icy rain, ugh) trying to find the friggin' thing and had to give up.

This is the drawback of using volunteer labor; we can be kind of stupid.

January 20, 2011

2010 was New Hampshire's warmest year on record

Last year was the warmest in New Hamnpshire since records began to be kept in 1895, according to Mary Stampone, UNH professor and state climatologist.

The 2010 mean temperature was 46.7 degrees Fahrenheit, nearly 3 degrees above the average from 1971 to 2000, which is considered the base temperature for modern comparisons, and 3.3 degrees warmer than the average from 1895 to 2010. Precipitation was also above normal for 2010, with an annual total of 47.45 inches, making it the 24th wettest in the last 115 years.

Stampone said 2010's warmth came early in the year, with very high temperatures for January, February, March and April followed by mostly normal temperatures for May through December. Since 1895, three of New Hampshire's top 10 warmest years occurred during the last decade, and seven of the 10 warmest have occurred since 1990.

century of humans putting heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere is, I'm sure, unrelated.

How much credence must be given to silly fears?

If you were absolutely convinced that road asphalt was causing your heart to defribrillate, would the local road agent have to rip up the street in front of your house and replace it with, say, crushed walnuts? No, of course not. People's concerns must have some basis in fact to force public action.

Should plans to install somewhat interactive electric meters, as a step toward making more efficient use of our electricity, be stymied by the fact that a few people are convinced the wireless meters do weird stuff to their bodies? No, of course not. As I said, people's concerns must have some basis in fact to force public action.

That's what Central Maine Power Co. says, in this Press-Herald article, and I can't blame them.

Whether "smart meters" will lead to hard-to-spot rate hikes is another matter, of course - one that isn't crazy to worry about.

January 21, 2011

February 2011

The Bangor Daily News has the story.

February 1, 2011

Last IPv4 blocks auctioned; the Net has to grow up now

The last blocks of IPv4 addresses have been auctioned off (release here; Slashdot item here). This means the Internet is about to get clogged up like a bathroom drain because all the addresses are taken.

Well, no. But it is interesting, and I suspect the folks at UNH's InterOperability Lab, which have spent years testing and certifying devices and systems for IPv6 compatibility, could explain it better.

If the room is warm, we think the globe is warming

There's nothing local going on because the latest snowstorm has shut down everything, so take note of this fascinating item, spotted in this NY Times article:

university students placed in a heated room expressed higher confidence that global warming was a proven fact than those placed in a neutral control room. Both liberals and conservatives were similarly influenced by the raised temperatures, and the effect was present even when attention was drawn to the temperature of the room.

And we humans think we're rational. Hah!

I really love this bit of the story:

In a separate study, participants were significantly more likely to agree with a statement that desertification and drought were a growing problem if they were made to eat several pretzels before answering.

Shocking news! Psychic fair didn't forsee that its hotel would shut suddenly!

There was a big psychic fair scheduled for this Saturday at the Radisson Hotel in Nashua - a fake-castle affair that is quite noticeable to people driving up the interstate from Massachusetts.

But despite the fact that the expso had (as it says in this laughable calendar listing) "Up to 25 different readers including: Angel Readings, Psychic/Intuitive Readings, Mediumship, Astrology and more..." nobody predicted that the owners would suddenly go bankrupt and throw everybody out, cancelling the show abruptly!

Astrologers and psychics and mediums can't predict the future! Whoa - who would have guessed?

February 2, 2011

Lots of light snow (10-1 moisture ratio) but it's piling up

Since the first of two snowstorms began yesterday morning, I've accumulated 7.5 inches of snow, which melts down to 0.75 inches of water - a 10-1 ratio, which is on the light side of average. I've got 25 inches of snow in the yard now with a lot more supposed to fall. It finally looks like a New Hampshire winter - hooray!

(I may not say "hooray" when I go to get the car out of the driveway, however)

Ham radio at McAuliffe Center (how's your Morse code?)

News item: The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, in conjunction with the Contoocook Valley Radio Club (CVRC) and the New England Amateur Radio Festival (NEAR-Fest), has completed production of an amateur radio station. This station, KA1SKY, will be formally dedicated on Feb. 14 at 11 a.m.part of School Club Round-up Week, to 2009's station project manager Ken Rust, KB1PRV, who recently became a Silent Key. The station will now be called the Mumley-Rust Memorial Station.

The station will allow voice transmission and Morse code on thousands of frequencies of various wavelengths. With the guidance of volunteer amateur radio operators, visitors will be able to talk to other "Hams" around the world as well as contact the International Space Station when it is in a favorable position. Communication with satellites in space will also be possible in order to receive and make transmissions to other parts of the world.

A brief history of the project will be given by project manager Wayne Santos, N1CKM, followed by the dedication with station manager Peter Stohrer, K1PJS. Future plans for the station will also be presented by Santos and David McDonald, education director at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center. The station will officially be open at 11:30 for student and public use.

February 3, 2011

Verizon offering iPhone today

Since I don't even own a cellphone, I'm really not the person to mention this, but Verizon Wireless starts offering the iPhone today. Globe article here.

And now I'm going back to shoveling snow ...

Web doodad predicts if your school will call a snowday

A Web doodad called the Snowday Calculator, which seems to have been around for years, will "predict" the likelihood that your school will be called because of snow. It uses data taken from US weather service, your location, and some information you input such as whether the administration is "easy, okay, harsh" and the level of hype about the storm, based on Facebook chatter. Silly, but clever.

Here it is.

This is why companies don't leap at cool new technology

The business world is usually pretty conservative, in a fiscal/business way. Any inventor or start-up can tell stories about potential customers deciding to stick with older, less effective technologies due to fear of the unknown.

But being cautious can make sense when you're dealing with lots of money, because new technology may let you down when it moves into the real world.

Consider the story of an intriguing heat pump, one that's more efficient and works better in cold weather, that was developed by an engineer and built by a small Bangor, Maine. It was a great story of the little guy leading the way to a more efficient world.

The units do seem to be wildly superior to traditional heat pumps when they're working - but a major customer that used them on a New Jersey Air Force base says they fail a third of the time. The Bangor firm, Hallowell International, has gone from 40 employees to 3, and its future seems iffy.

UNH oversees drilling of two-mile-long Antarctic ice core

From UNH News Service: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide project closed out its fifth drilling season on Friday, Jan. 28, after reaching a depth of 3,331 meters â about two miles â thereby deriving the deepest ice core ever drilled by U.S. researchers. The WAIS Divide project, for which the University of New Hampshire provides science coordination, is investigating the last 100,000 years of Earth's climate history. The ice at 3,331 meters fell as snow about 100,000 years ago.

The drilling site is about 600 miles from the South Pole where the ice flows out to the sea in opposing directions â an ice divide. The location was selected because it is the best place on the planet to determine how greenhouse gases have changed during the last 100,000 years.

The high annual snowfall at the site enables individual annual layers of snowfall to be identified and counted, much like counting tree rings, back to about 40,000 years. (Below that, the layers become too compressed to allow annual layers to be resolved.) Over time, the ice forms as snow is compacted at the surface by subsequent snowfall. The compacted snow contains dust, chemicals and atmospheric gases, which are trapped in the ice and are indicators of past climate. The deeper the ice, the further back in time measurements can be made.

Mark Twickler, who heads up the WAIS Divide Science Coordination Office at UNH, says the ice cores are five-inch diameter cylinders that get cut into one-meter (three feet) sections. They are sent by ship and refrigerated truck to the NSF National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver. The ice is then cut into smaller samples and sent to 27 investigators around the U.S. who make the measurements. Part of Twickler's job is to divvy up the precious ice samples depending on specific researcher's investigations.

In addition to measuring what the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases were in the past, the research team can also determine what the surface air temperature was in the past by studying changes in the isotopic composition of the water that makes up the ice.

The WAIS Divide project is specifically investigating the small timing offsets between past changes in the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and changes in temperature. By understanding these timing offsets, the research team can determine the role changes in ocean circulation had in the release of carbon dioxide from the ocean and how an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere warms the planet.

The National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs funds the project, primarily through its Antarctic Glaciology Program.

February 4, 2011

McAuliffe Center: 40th anniversary of Shepard's moon flight

The McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord will be celebrating the 40th anniversary of Apollo 14 - the ship that brought Alan Shepard to the moon - tonight at 7 PM, and throughout the day on Saturday, February 5 and Sunday, February 6.

On February 5, 1971, with Command Module Pilot Stuart Roosa staying in orbit around the Moon, Commander Alan Shepard and Lunar Module Pilot Ed Mitchell touched down on the lunar surface in the Fra Mauro highlands. Shepard, the first American sent into space, was the fifth human to walk on the Moon, and famously took in a round of golf along the way.

Friday night's program will feature Dr. Mark McConnell and a look back on the Apollo 14 mission, how it was conducted, and how it contributed to our understanding of the Moon. The Discovery Center observatory will be open from 7-10 PM. Following the program will be a free Skywatch outside with the New Hampshire Astronomical Society including personal telescope advice and assistance. Telescope viewing begins at 7 PM.

Presentations will be given on the Apollo 14 mission at 11:30, 1:30 and 3:30 PM on Saturday and Sunday with a special Tonight's Sky planetarium show at 2 and 4 PM focusing on the Moon. Visitors will have a chance to try "lunar golf". Featured exhibits will include the Discovery Center's Moon Rock exhibit, lunar crafts, and Lunar Lander Simulator where visitors can try touching down on the lunar surface. Special events are free with paid general admission.

Daphnia minnehaha with mild defensive neckteeth against predators Credit: Dr. Paul D.N. Hebert (University of Guelph).

UNH helps in massive genome analysis of the waterflea

From UNH News Service:

From an environmental perspective, Daphnia pulex â the waterflea â is the best-studied organism on the planet. Scientists know how this species responds to pollution, predators, day and night, making it an important model for ecological and evolutionary research. Its genome, however, remained elusive, limiting understanding of how the environment and genes interact.

Until now. An international team of researchers comprising the Daphnia Genomics Consortium, including four from the University of New Hampshire's Hubbard Center for Genome Studies, has described the complete genome of Daphnia.

And, despite the Daphnia's near-microscopic size, it contains more than 31,000 genes, more than any other animal with a complete gene sequence, including humans. The findings are detailed in an article in the journal Science this week.

"It's personally a major achievement," says W. Kelley Thomas, Hubbard Professor in Genomics and director of the HCGS, adding that the Daphnia sequence was among the center's original goals at its founding in 2001. "This genome gives biologists and ecologists the tools they need to do genomic analysis on this organism from an ecological perspective."

The end product is a better understanding of what genes matter for organisms to cope with environmental stresses like pollutants and global warming and of the technologies necessary to understand how these genes function within an animal that is easily studied in water reservoirs around the globe.

The study, "The Ecoresponsive Genome of Daphnia pulex," was led by researchers at Indiana University's Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics (CGB), Utah State University, the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, and UNH's Hubbard Center. It found that the microscopic freshwater crustacean contains at least 30,907 genes, compared to approximately 25,000 in humans.

Scientists have studied Daphnia for centuries because of its importance in aquatic food webs and for its transformational responses to environmental stress. Predators signal some of the animals to produce exaggerated spines, neck-teeth or helmets in self-defense. And like the virgin nymph of Greek mythology that shares its name, Daphnia thrives in the absence of males â by clonal reproduction, until harsh environmental conditions favor the benefits of sex.

Arguably, more is known about the ecology and stress biology of the water flea than any other animal. The genome project was conceived with an expectation that many new gene functions would be uncovered when studied in light of the animal's natural environment â not necessarily expecting to discover many more genes. Yet, Daphnia's genome is no ordinary genome.

"Daphnia's high gene number is largely because its genes are multiplying, by creating copies at a higher rate than other species," said project leader and CGB genomics director John Colbourne. "We estimate a rate that is three times greater than those of other invertebrates and 30 percent greater than that of human."

"One theory is that Daphnia is so good at adapting to so many environments because it has this huge catalog of genes to call upon," says Thomas. The researchers note that more than one-third of Daphnia's genes are undocumented in any other organism â they are completely new to science.

At UNH, where the relatively new field of environmental genomics is at the core of the HCGS mission, the Daphnia project resulted in productive collaborations around the university. "It was a significant part of starting many science careers," says Thomas, noting that many undergraduate, graduate and visiting students participated.

Jim Haney, professor of freshwater biology, helped with cultures of Daphnia, which are common in New Hampshire lakes and ponds. In addition, as the science of genome sequencing evolved in the past decade to use "fewer pipettes and more computers," says Thomas, the Hubbard Center forged strong bonds with UNH's computer science department, in particular professors Dan Bergeron and Phil Hatcher.

International collaboration has been essential to this project. Over the course of the project, the Daphnia Genomics Consortium has grown from a handful of founding members to over 450 investigators distributed around the globe. Nearly 200 scientists have contributed published work resulting from the genome study, many in open-source journals published as a thematic series by BioMedCentral.

A list of these publications can be found at http://www.biomedcentral.com/series/Daphnia. Daphnia Genomics Consortium projects are featured at http://daphnia.cgb.indiana.edu. More information on this article is available at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/17183.html.

February 5, 2011

I don't just do geekery, but farm-and-forestry reporting, too

Last night at the New Hampshire Farm and Forest Exposition, I won the 2011 Fred Beane Award "for achievement in reporting on issues and developments in the field of agriculture". It was fun, and I got to talk about one of my most enjoyable stories/columns, when I tried to calculate the number of leaves that change color in New Hampshire each leaf-peeping season. (Between 600 billion and 600 trillion, depending on which calculation you used.)

I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know who Fred E. Beane was. This citation from the Eastern States Exposition for an award given in 1974 says he was an "unrivalled pioneer farm editor who, as an interpreter and communicator of the agricultural revolution, has done much to shorten the time-lag between research findings and their application on the farm," which sounds pretty cool.

I'm facing another mystery with this presentation, too. The short biography of me they prepared noted that I drew the comic strip for my college newspaper, a fact that is known to few people, none of whom are involved with the Farm & Forest Expo. I wonder how the heck they found that out?!?!

February 6, 2011

Wearing ice crampons to shovel the roof

There is so much snow and ice on our roof that my wife and ice wore microspikes - a sort of mini-ice-crampon - when we went up there yesterday to shovel, to give ourselves more traction.

This is the first time in 20 years here that I've shoveled off the roof out of concern about weight of snow buildup. We've had more snow in the past, but there have been intermittent warm days that make it slide off (I have a metal roof). Not this year.

February 7, 2011

Right whales like Gulf in Maine in winter

A mating ground for rare right whales has been found in the Gulf of Maine, about 60 miles offshore from Bar Harbor, reports the Glove. (Read the story here)

But it's a weird mating ground by mammal standards: There aren't many females, and not much mating.

(Researchers) did not see whales mating, and the whales did not appear to be feeding. They did not seem to be doing much of anything.

The article says there may be as few as 440 right whales left in the world, which doesn't sound big enough to maintain a population for such a large, slow-breeding animal.

The name comes because they contain lots of oil and floated when dead, which made it easier for whaling ships to snag them - that is, they were the right whales to look for.

One in 50 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan is a robot

Wired has a piece pointing to a military report that 2,000 robots are being used by U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which means than one out of every 50 of our "soldiers" is a robot.

Here's the Wired piece, which notes that "these rolling and crawling bots are still pretty stupid. And there's not much hope they'll get any smarter anytime soon." It also points out that the 2,000 figure is delivered robots, which doesn't mean they've actually been deployed.

February 8, 2011

DEC cofounder Ken Olsen dies

Two events created modern Nashua/southern New Hampshire: One was the 1952 arrival of Sanders Associates, a defense electronics firm, into the empty mills left by the collapse of the textile industry, and the other was the early 1970s arrival of Digital Equipment Corp., expanding up from Massachusetts. The latter brought us firmly into the Route 128 technology-industry camp and set us on a path that we're still following.

The move was pushed by DEC cofounder Ken Olsen, who led its push to create a minicomputer alternative to mainframes. We should still be grateful that he didn't decide to go south to Rhode Island. DEC is now part of HP, and is still around, employing lots of local brainy folks.

Olsen died yesterday at age 84. Here's the Globe obit.

February 9, 2011

Power lines and leukemia - is there any evidence of a link?

ADDENDUM: The state has a data tool that lets you look at public health information by time or geography. In NH, the number of child leukemia cases over the past 15 years is so small that it can't be divvied up among our 9 counties, due to fears that individuals' privacy might be accidentally violated, so I can't take a look at whether the rates differ widely among parts of the state with fewer power lines.

To find the site,check the state's leukemia page (here) and click on the Environmental Health Data Integration Network (EHDIN) link.

There's a big fight in New Hampshire over a proposal to build about 40 miles of high-voltage DC power lines (which use enormous towers) over relatively untouched North Country hills, while the rest of the system would run over existing rights of way where other towers exist. The lines would bring 1,200 megawatts of power down from large Quebec hydropower dams, roughly equivalent to the power output of Seabrook nuclear plant.

There are complicated economic arguments and environmental arguments about the plan (is "big hydro" green or not?), but I noticed from Tuesday's protests at Concord that the anti-powerline folks argue that the lines would increase childhood leukemia.

What's behind that argument is a confusing study in the UK. It found statistically significant increases in childhood luekemia within a certain distance of power lines - although the disease is still very rare - but cautioned that the numbers were so small that you shouldn't take the results seriously, partly because there's no way known to science that the lines could be causing leukemia. Here's a New Scientist story.

A study that says "we found a connection but it probably doesn't mean anything" is bound to confuse everybody.

As the New Scientist story notes, it's particularly confusing because earlier, a "UK Childhood Cancer Study report, which declared that there was no risk to children living these distances away from power lines."

New Hampshire has a leukemia-tracking program that I'm going to check with. I don't think they have data to report yet, but you never know.

(A note about the system, which is branded Northern Pass: It would run 140 miles of DC lines from the Canadian border to Franklin, in central N.H., where a $250 million (oops) converter terminal would switch it to AC power that would be carried 40 miles to the Deerfield station. High-voltage DC can carry electricity with great efficiency, losing much less power along the way than AC lines, but it's difficult and expensive to switch the power to the AC needed by our systems. Hence they tend to be big superhighway projects, with just a couple of "off-ramps.")

February 10, 2011

Any rap with "SohCahToa" in it is OK by me

A student at Nashua High School named MacKenzie Turnbull has recorded a math rap, and uploaded it to YouTube. I am of an age that rap isn't my favorite musical genre, but any song* that contains SohCahToa is OK by me.

Here's the YouTube link for the recording, titled "PreCalc Rap". I look forward to her "Fractal Fandango", or perhaps a "Linear Algebra Liturgy" if she gets her degree in the subject.

*is "song" the right term?

The rocket-launching tip-up built by Mike Haeg (who's from Minnesota, but we'll call him an honorary Northern New Englander)

An ice fishing tip-up that launches a model rocket

I have just stumbled upon (via Boing-Boing) what may be the ultimate geeky Northern New England item: An ice-fishing tip-up (the little device that signals when you've gotten a bite) which doesn't spring the usual flag, but which launches a model rocket!

You can see the video here (from whence I stole the photo). Then you can writhe in envy or shake your head in disbelief at such a waste of effort - you choose.

By the way, a commenter to the post suggests that the creator, Mike Haeg, tie the fishing line to the rocket, so the catch can be pulled out of the hole automatically. But Haeg says that would be auto-setting, which is illegal in Minnesota ... but legal in Wisconsin. I wonder if it's legal in New Hampshire?

February 11, 2011

Nantucket whaling ship with "Moby-Dick" connection found near Hawaii

The Globe has a big story today about remains of a Nantucket whaling ship that have been found "on a remote reef almost 600 miles northwest of Honolulu." The ship, The Two Brothers, was captained by the man who previously led the Essex, the ship sunk by a sperm whale - a story that inspired Herman Meville to write "Moby-Dick."

Here's the story, with some good graphics and a slide show. The NY Times has a story too.

Visiting the nuclear research lab in the heart of Cambridge, Mass.

CNet's Green Tech column has a piece, with a bunch of photos, about a visit to the MIT Nuclear Research Laboratory, whose mission "has changed over the years, most recently shifting its primary emphasis from medical research to experiments on new materials and fuels for nuclear power."

Once inside, you can see the structure that holds the actual reactor, which at its core is only 15 inches across. It's puny in terms of output, too, able to generate five megawatts of thermal power, compared to 1,000 megawatts or more of electric power (or about 3,000 megawatts of thermal power) from a commercial nuclear power plant. The current reactor was installed in 1975 and it uses a more highly enriched version of uranium fuel than a commercial plant.

There are some who would be appalled that nuclear power is being discussed on a column titled "Green Tech," but I'm not among them.

Read the whole piece here.

Discovery Center: Update on those scads of exoplanets we've spotted

If you want to know more about all those planets being discovered around other stars, including one system with six - count 'em, six! - planets, you'll want to check the Super Steller Friday program tonight at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center in Concord. Discovery Center Educator John Gianforte will give a presentation about NASA's effort to find out more about those alien worlds.

It starts at 7 p.m. Recommended for ages 8+, children under 13 must be accompanied by an adult. $9/Adults, $8/Seniors & Students, $6/Children.

February 12, 2011

Remembering a visit to the old Science Park in Boston

Last week my Telegraph column concerned upgrades to the Hayden Planetarium at the Boston Museum of Science, centered around technology from Nashua-based Sky-Skan. (Here's the column.) As part of it, we ran an old black-and-white photo from the MOS showing little kids looking at an earlier generation of star projectors. It was a cute picture - they were all dressed up in party dress and coat-and-tie - but the museum had no information about it.

Well, guess what: The boy was a Nashuan and the picture came from a 1953 book called "Allan and Tricia Visit Science Park," created as a promotional item by the museum. It's "Dick and Jane" meet a proto-Carl Sagan; very fun.

I know this because his family called me after the story appeared. The whole story is in Dean Shalhoup's column today in the Telegraph - read it here. It's worth a read, because nobody tells a nostalgic tale like Dean-o.

February 13, 2011

The North Atlantic Oscillation and big snows - what's the link?

Researchers are trying to pin down more of the connection between the North Atlantic Oscillation, which you might consider the north Atlantic's version of El Nino/La Nina, and big snow events.

Here's a good, quick Columbia U. page about it, which dewcribes it like this: "The NAO is the dominant mode of winter climate variability in the North Atlantic region ranging from central North America to Europe and much into Northern Asia. The NAO is a large scale seesaw in atmospheric mass between the subtropical high and the polar low."

The Globe has an article about research today (read it here) which notes that the NAO is proving hard to predict:

The link between the North Atlantic Oscillation and snowfall is intriguing because the oscillation can go into decades-long periods where it is dominated by a positive or negative phase. From the mid-50s until the blizzard of '78, for example, it was in a negative phase more often than not, accompanied by some of the snowiest years of the past century. But in the 1979-1980 winter, a generally positive North Atlantic Oscillation took over until fairly recently. While some researchers believe there are discernable decade patterns to the oscillation, others say a good measurement record dates back only to 1950.

How J.C. Penney fooled Google and gamed Xmas-time searches

The NY Times has a great, long article about how subtle link farms were used to push J.C. Penney to the top of a number of product searches on Google. The company says "we didn't do it!" but Google is pissed off and ramping down the company's results manually.

The article ends with an interesting twist that will probalby piss off Google ever more: J.C. Penney is one of the largest purchaser of paid ads on Google - so perhaps the company was less inclined to crack down on its link farming? That's just the kind of question that European regulators are asking.

The article is here, and is well worth a read.

February 14, 2011

Proof that the Internet is full of pointless junk: A video of me

How heavy is the snow on your roof?

It includes the number - an inch of rain weighs 5.2 pounds per square foot of level ground - that I didn't include in an article last week about the weight of snow, much to the annoyance of a number of readers who wanted to know how I'd gotten my dat.

More on that "pulsed power makes ice disappear" startup near Dartmouth

My column today has more on IceCode, the startup using technology from a Dartmouth College professor that sends very short pulses of high power through heating elements to separate built-up ice from surfaces. I have previously mentioned Iin this post) a video showing an iced-up windshield get fixed like magic. It sounds darn good to me.

February 15, 2011

Ken Olsen's legacy - nobody has quite matched it

Still, the Massachusetts high-tech sector has never fully recovered from the collapse of Digital and the state's other leading computer companies.

That's part of the conclusion from Hiawatha Bray's look at Digital Equipment Corp. in the light of the recent death of cofounder Ken Olsen. Among other things, Digital had 34,000 employees - 34,000! - at its height, many in manufacturing. Read tje article here.

Another piece says innovation les to Olsen's fall as well as his rise, because while he saw minicomputers toppling mainframes, he couldn't see personal computers moving in hext. Read it here.

NASA photo The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite collected this natural-color view of New England, the Canadian Maritimes, and coastal waters at 10:25 a.m. U.S. Eastern Standard Time on January 24, 2011.

An amazing satellite photo of "cloud streets" stretching over the ocean

Astonishing photos from satellites have become almost old-hat, but this one (spotted at NASA, via its Twitter feed) boggled my mind. It's a natural-color picture taken by the MODIS on NASA's (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite, on Jan. 24, described like this:

What do you get when you mix below-freezing air temperatures, frigid northwest winds from Canada, and ocean temperatures hovering around 39 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 5 degrees Celsius)? Paved highways of clouds across the skies of the North Atlantic.

March 2011

March 1, 2011

Dense snow on the ground

Yesterday's rain - 7/10ths of an inch where I live - compacted the 24 inches of snow on the ground in my yard into 20.5. But boy, is it dense: It melted down to 4.8 inches of water, which is just a tiny bit over 4-1 water equivalent. Very, very dense.

As a sign of how much energy it takes to break ice bonds, I had to pour 5 inches of nearly boiling water into the rain gauge to melt what turned out to be 4.8 inches worth of ice/snow, and it still took about 10 minutes.

RGGI created $404 million in efficiency, and NH believes climate is changing

Even as New Hampshire ponders leaving the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the program says the 10 states in the pact have used $404 million in auction payments, mostly from utilities, to pay for various efficiency programs. (Reuters story here.)

On a slightly related note, Larry Hamilton of UNH points out that surveys by the Carsey Institute say the state's public isn't friendly to climate-change skeptics:

(Surveys) consistently show that about half of NH residents believe climate is changing now caused by human activities; about 40% agree it's changing now but due to natural forces; and less than 10% think it's not changing now. We wrote one report about these poll results last summer - PDF here. Since then we've done three more statewide surveys (plus one in the North Country), all getting about the same results.

A real alien invasion makes it to the movies: Asian longhorned beetles

The cost of making document films has plummeted in the past decade, and there are more than you can shake a stick at (even a stick containing an invasive beetle), but here's another one to think about: "Bugged: The Race to Eradicate the Asian Longhorned Beetle." Made by a Fitchburg, Mass., native, it concerns the problems at Worcester, Mass., where 25,000 trees were turned into chips for a power plant because they contained beetles, as well as other places where the beetle has appeared.

Here's the website.

It's being screened tomorrow (March 2) in Washington D.C. as part of National Invasive Awareness Week.

March 2, 2011

Don't you want to get up early and measure snow in the morning?

As I have mentioned before - probably too many times - I have joined a volunteer group called CoCoRaHS (Community Collaborative Rain Hail Snow network). You buy high quality rain gauge, get a little online training, and become part of a Web-based data gathering national network that, among other things, gathers data to help predict flash flooding.

It's weirdly satisfying, in a weather-geeky way, to upload your backyard numbers and see your data on the state and national map. I've also found it quite interesting to learn the water equivalence in this year's snowfall - it gives a real quantitative kick to the vague "this snow is heavy, that snow is light" feeling I've always had.

Admittedly, it's kind a pain at times, since the measurements should be done by 8 a.m.. But it's not like you get fined if you slip: I've missed several days and I've only been doing it six months. Another drawback is that you have to buy the rain gauge, which isn't cheap - $25 or so. It's a really nice rain gauge, though.

March is their recruitment month. Why not check it out?

7-year sentence for modem-hacking scheme

A N.H. man who released malware that made computer modems dial special premium phone numbers, racking up millions in charges that he and buddies pocketed, has been sentenced to 7 years in jail.

Here's the Telegraph story. It even got picked up by Slashdot.

The eastern cougar is extinct; long live other cougar subspecies!

The question of cougars is a contentious one in New Hampshire. There are a number of people who swear they have seen one in the wild, but officials point to the lack of any proof - no good footprints, no hair tufts caught on barbed wire, no photos from handheld cameras or the many automatic "critter cams" in the woods - and say that the sightings are probably of bobcats, which are bigger than most people realize. But nobody is quite certain; while breeding pairs are highly unlikely, it's possible that a wild animal or two has escaped from captivity and is lurking near Mount Monandock or the White Mountains.

However, if we do have any cougars, they're not eastern cougars, because that species is now officially extinct. This isn't big news, actually - as U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says: "Although the eastern cougar has been on the endangered species list since 1973, its existence has long been questioned. ... Reports of cougars observed in the wild examined during the review process described cougars of other subspecies, often South American subspecies, that had been held in captivity and had escaped or been released to the wild, as well as wild cougars." (You can see the site here.)

The last confirmed eastern cougar was trapped in 1938.

March 3, 2011

Discover Center Friday: 'Cosmology and Future Telescopes'

At the McAuliffee-Shepard Discovery Center tomorrow, March 4, a presentation of planetarium show Tonight's Sky will be held at 7 p.m., followed by a talk from Martin Ratcliffe, writer for Astronomy Magazine and former president of the International Planetarium Society. As author and editor of Cosmology and the Evolution of the Universe, he is involved in searching for answers to questions like: How did our universe begin? What is its fate? With a focus on cosmology and exciting new instruments being developed, his presentation will explore what astronomers expect to learn about the early origins of the universe as we achieve the ability to reach back to the first stars and first galaxies formed in the universe.

The Discovery Center observatory will be open from 7-10 PM. Following the program will be a free Skywatch outside with the New Hampshire Astronomical Society including personal telescope advice and assistance. Telescope viewing begins at 7 PM.

Cost is $9 adults, $8 seniors & students, $6 children. Details are here.

Dartmouth professor joins Inventor Hall of Fame

Eric Fossum, engineering professor at Dartmouth College, has been named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame for leading the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that created the CMOS active pixel sensor camera-on-a-chip. From the statement: "Today, CMOS image sensors are a fixture in camera phones, and other applications include digital SLR cameras, embedded web-cams, automotive safety systems, swallowable pill cameras, toys and video games, and wireless video-security networks. Worldwide annual revenue for the technology is estimated to reach $6 billion in 2011."

I know of three other NH residents on the list: Dean Kamen, videogame pioneer Ralph Baer, and GPS pioneer Roger Easton. There may be others I've missed.

March 4, 2011

FIRST Robotics at Verizon Wireless Arena this weekend

If you've never stopped by the FIRST Robotics regionals, being held this weekend at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, you should. It's free, with competitions all day today and Saturday (they break an hour for lunch around noon). You can wander in any time and stay as long as you like.

It's a really upbeat celebration of teenage geekdom overlaid with traditional sports-fan-type goofiness - a huge event, which occupies the entire ice-hocky rink and fills a third of the stands. Just going through the "pit" where teams scramble to repair their robots is enough to give hope to anybody who despairs of today's not-do-it-yourself society.

Here's the U-L story.

Here's the schedule.

Incandescent bulbs are like a gas pump that leaks 80% of the time

My column on Monday is about incadescent light bulbs and how they're, thankfully, finally being phased out. I'm still writing it, but I'm rather proud of the metaphor that I open with:

Imagine if gas stations installed pumps that spilled four-fifths of everything you bought.

You'd fork out $10 but only get $2 worth of gas in the tank. The rest would spill onto the ground, stinking up the joint and polluting the groundwater.

Outrageous! We wouldn't stand for it!

Actually, we might â because that's what happens every time we turn on a traditional light bulb.

Incandescent bulbs, which force electricity through tungsten wires until they come so close to melting that they glow, have been described as space heaters that release light as a by-product. This sounds like a joke but is pretty accurate.

"You're losing as much as 90 percent of your input watts in heat," said Joe Murdoch, a professor emeritus of electrical engineering from UNH who has written a number of books about lighting.

Math professor who wrote novels on the physics of golf

Several years ago I wrote about Francis Scheid, a then-86-year-old former math professor who had written four self-published novels around the mathematics and physics of golf, thus combining two loves. To be perfectly honest they were not the best-written of stories - creating dialogue, as I found when I tried writing novels in my youth, is much harder than it looks - but the approach was intriguing.

As was Scheid. He got his math PhD from MIT and was a math teacher for the Navy, which took him to the souht Pole, Burma and Switzerland, among other places. he also spent decades teaching at Boston University.

Earlier this week he died, at age 90. His family wrote a long obituary discussing his personality, which is worth a perusal here. (My column has disappeared in a web system switchover, or I'd show it to you as well).

Big cat sightings prove to be as elusive as the cats

ADDENDUM: Here's the story, complete with some really cool historic photos.

I'm writing a story for the Sunday Telegraph about mountain lions in NH, spurred by the Fish & Wildlife Service's decision to declare the eastern cougar extinct, as noted in an earlier blog post. (Other subspecies, including the Florida panther, are doing fine.)

One thing I'm finding is that "friend of a friend" reports get less exciting as you hunt them down. Here's an example: One person I talked to told me a friend of his once saw a cougar in a tree, where it had taken a deer carcass. Awsome! Alas, I finally talked to the guy - it turns out he saw week-old, cougar-like footprints pointed out by other people, who say a nearby deer carcass had been moved during the night, just like cougars do.

Reality is so much less interesting than our memories of reality.

March 5, 2011

UNH finds home routers/modems aren't ready for IPv6

NetworkWorld has a report on a recent "Plugfest" test of home routers and modems at UNH's InterOperability Lab, one of the nation's foremost places to see whether equipment is ready for IPv6, and says the results weren't pretty, although details are scarce because labs "are typically tight-lipped about Plugfest results."

Equipment makers don't have an endless supply of time to get it right. IPv4 depletion for U.S. companies is fully expected to occur in 2011. ARIN says it has around 80 million IPv4 addresses left and expects to run out of these addresses within nine months. We will soon see a day when new computers, servers, mobile devices and the so-called Internet of Things can only get an IPv6 address. Carrier-grade NAT (CGN, also known as large-scale NAT) will suffice as a stopgap measure, but it comes with its own set of problems

Read the whole article here. (Spotted via Slashdot)

March 6, 2011

Measuring snow is not organic chemistry, thankfully

My wife was watching me doing my weekly snow-water-equivalent measurement this morning: pack the full depth of snow (16" - melting has begun) into the rain gauge, then pour in measured amounts of hot water to melt it down. She cringed watched me dribble a little bit of water on the counter here and splash a tiny bit out of the beaker there, and finally couldn't help herself: "You'd have real problems in organic chemistry, where the amount left on the (stirring) spoon would make a difference."

Lab work was never my strong suit.

The 16 inches of snow melted down to 5.2 inches of water, which is the most water equivalent I've measured in the yard this year. It's supposed to rain and be above 40 degrees all day, so the snow should get super-saturated.

And just to remind me that it's the end of winter, my attic is leaking.

March 7, 2011

Good riddance to incandescent bulbs

My Telegraph column today is a borderline rant about how the out-moded technology of incandescent lights should have disappeared from homes a while ago.Here it is.

I expect it will get at least as much reaction as my "looking for mountain lions" and "parking backwards is best" column. Who says geeky stuff doesn't draw responses?

March 8, 2011

Are energy efficient devices really better for the environment?

Yesterday in my Telegraph column I lambasted incandescent light bulbs because they're grossly inefficient (drawing a lively conversation in the comments section, as you'll see if you check it out.) But there is a non-trivial section of the economic and environmental community which worries about the Jevons Paradox, aka "rebound effect," in which greater efficiency leads people to use more of the product, negating energy savings.

The New Yorker had an excellent, long piece about it in December that is well worth a read (here), while the NY Times has a piece about it today (here). The Times quotes this from a research paper:

Consider what's happened with lighting over the past three centuries. As people have switched from candles to oil-powered lamps to incandescent bulbs and beyond, the amount of energy needed to produce a unit of light has plummeted. Yet people have found so many new places to light that today we spend the same proportion of our income on light as our much poorer ancestors did in 1700, "Many have come to believe that new, highly-efficient solid-state lighting â generally LED technology, like that used on the displays of stereo consoles, microwaves and digital clocks â will result in reduced energy consumption. We find the opposite is true."

Hmmm ... perhaps my incandescent scorn was misguided?

March 9, 2011

"Magical thinking" makes us buy celebrity stuff

I'm suffering from a covering-town-meeting hangover, so I'll indulge in a quirky non-local tidbit: An NY Times story about social scientists tying the habit of paying big bucks for celebrity stuff, like Eric Clapton's old guitar, to superstitious beliefs and "magical thinking" about properties being linked to physical objects.

I dunno. I was a Clapton freak as a youngster, but I don't think I'd ever cough up $960,000 for his old guitar.

Here's the story - which notes that even replicas of Clapton's guitar sell for $20,000. That's an example of "imitative magic", which is also reflected when you stab pins into voodoo dolls that like like your enemy.

Study: Some randomly chosen politicans would improve democracy

After covering town meeting for 10 towns, I'm attuned to elections at the moment, so let me note a paper by Cornell physicists which has this summary: "A small number of randomly selected legislators mixed with elected ones should make parliaments more effective. ... These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations."

Check it out here.

Who needs "approval voting" - as one NH legislator wants - when you can just draw lots?

New Hampshire has a different Daylight Saving Time than the rest of the country

Apparently having the first-in-the-nation political primary isn't enough for New Hampshire: We want to have the first-in-the-nation Daylight Saving Time, too.

It seems that when the federal government changed daylight saving time back in 2007, New Hampshire forgot that that we have a state law on the topic. As a result, there is a state law (RSA 21:36) that says Eastern Daylight Time starts weeks later in New Hampshire than in the rest of the county (first Sunday in April rather than second Sunday in March) and ends weeks earlier (last Sunday in October rather than first Sunday in November.)

Legislators are scrambling to change this rather embarrassing discrepancy with a bill (HB61) that would put us back in line with the feds before we change our clocks next week. But that seems a little cowardly in today's political environment, when state's rights are all the rage.

Perhaps we should instead keep the difference and celebrate Granite State Daylight Time as the chronological embodiment of our independent heritage. We could create a militia to line state borders and keep out clocks showing Massachusetts Time. Or maybe the law should be changed to say that any sunlight that originates entirely within New Hampshire is exempt from federal Daylight Savings regulations.*

* note to non-NH readers - these are referencers to a couple particularly interesting laws that have been proposed lately. Don't worry if you don't get the joke.

March 10, 2011

The BMSB stink bug

Two new invasive bugs set their sights on New Hampshire

Did you know that the state has a program in which bugs are collected from filters in people's swimming pools, and then analyzed? Me neither, but now I know why it exists: It has spotted the arrival of the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB), an invasive pest from east Asia that was spotted in Pennsylvania in the 1990s and which has spread to 32 states. It caused a 10 percent apple crop loss in Pennsylvania and Delaware one year, so it's nothing to sneeze at.

A release from the Division of Plant Industry in the state Department of Agriculture says BMSB and another pest that is on its way here but hasn't been spotted yet, the spotted wing drosophila (SWD), "cause damage in a wide-array of agricultural crops, and both can subsist in non-agricultural plants, like forest and ornamental trees, in the absence of a suitable agricultural host. This means that both can sustain populations at a size large enough to allow for rapid infestation when an agricultural crop becomes available."

They're asking people to keep an eye out for BMSB and send "high quality digital photos or specimens to the task force involved with determining how widespread it is throughout the state." For more information, check: http://extension.unh.edu/Agric/AGPMP/Brownmarmoratedstinkbug.htm

Some details:

"In early fall, BMSB aggregates inside homes and other structures in search of a protected shelter from winter's harsh conditions. It is very good at finding cracks and crevices into homes, trunks of automobiles, etc. It is this habit that caused it to be considered, from the first, a homeowner's nuisance rather than an agricultural pest. It wasn't until the early 2000s that the first BMSB began to be detected in crops across the mid-Atlantic region."

"SWD differs from other drosophilids, known collectively as "vinegar flies," in that the apparatus with which the female lays eggs in host material (the ovipositor) is serrated like a saw, which allows her to cut her way into ripening and ripe fruit to lay her eggs, and is not restricted, as are the other vinegar flies, to already rotting fruit. Once the eggs hatch, they become larvae, commonly known as maggots, which feed on the fruit, spoiling it for human consumption. SWD can readily feed in soft-skinned fruits, like nectarines, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, and strawberries. It has also been observed utilizing alternate hosts like crabapple and dogwood. It has multiple generations in a year, so that populations can build up and be quite large by harvest."

Contact the Division of Plant Industry, NH Dept. of Agriculture, Markets & Food, 271-2561, or piera.siegert@agr.state.nh.us.

Forums are dead, long live the forums

The Telegraph has ended its "forums" section, which created discussion areas for general topics that were supposed to draw crowds of people who would have lively, intelligent debate prodded by our news stories, thus drawing hordes of eager advertisers. They never really took off, and as the Telegraph's closing-them-down notice says, "Forum participation has withered over the past several months as more readers post their opinions directly to online articles. This trend is not unique to nashuatelegraph.com. Most online newspapers have phased out broad-based issue forums in favor of encouraging readers to interact to specific news articles and features."

It's the latest change in the attempt to build communities online.

You can read the whole announcement, and admire the clipart of a tombstone, here.

Ice-breaking on Maine rivers

I didn't realize that the Coast Guard regularly sends ice-breaking ships in the Kennebeck River and other Maine rivers - to the point that the AP story (read it here) describes it as "a sure sign of spring."

A bit of quick searching finds a YouTube video of it from 2009 and another from 2007.

Comments, photos, streaming video from court, in a single format

The Telegraph, and other media outlets, are covering an insanity trial resulting from a local murder. We have two reporters and a photographer in the courtroom.

We are using a software "platform" called CoverItLive to channel all their work into a single, streaming site. It lets everybody put their text posts, photos, video and audio into a single window inside our website.

Check it out here: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/csp/cms/sites/telegraph/specialreports/gribbletrial/index.csp If it's after court hours, you'll see an archive of the posts and photos, but won't be able to see the video unless you click on another link to an archive.

This is a different way of doing something like this; it will be interesting to see the reaction we get.

By the way, CoverItLive is free to us. They put up the occasional advertisement.

March 11, 2011

Most of your body heat doesn't escape through your head

Many times over the years I have written about the incorrect idea that some <bignum> percentage of our body heat escapes through our heads, as if our craniums were a sort of biological radiator while the rest of our skin was insulation. The reality is that our surface heat radiation is roughly similar over most of our body, with some variation due to amount of blood supply near the surface, depth of subcutaneous fat, presence of heair, etc.

Since our heads tend to be the only part that is uncovered in winter time, the actual truth is a <bignum> percentage of heat *that escapes from our body when we're outdoors* escapes from our head. Quite different.

I bring this up because (a) I have nothing else to write about, (b) winter is slowly disappearing, and (c) the Speed Bump cartoon this morning is a very funny take on the topic - so read it here.

No, the 'supermoon' didn't cause the Japan quake

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog explains why the position of the moon didn't cause the Japan earthquake, and that the whole "supermoon" nonsense which is polluting the Net is baloney. Read it here.

March 13, 2011

Call it the anti-Ark museum

We visited the Harvard Museum of Natural History yesterday to see a talk. It's a charmingly old-fashioned museum, best known as the home of the glass flowers, a huge collection of incredibly detailed and accurate models of flowers and plants made out of glass a century ago. Even the labels on the exhibits look old-fashioned, with the sort of typography I expect to see in flyers for snake-oil nostrums.

Most of the museum consists of stuffed animals, life-sized versions of hundreds, probably thousands, of species, from hummingbirds to elephants, from giraffes to platypuses (or whatever the plural is), plus insects and primates and reptiles and amphibians and fish by the zillions, crammed into glass cases. None of this interactive-exhibit nonsense for them, thank you very much.

It's weirdly fascinating, but I realized as I wanted through room after room that it's also a brilliant counter-example to Noah's Ark literalists. The collection barely touches on the range and number of species on the planet; yet it's so huge that it shows the mysterious linear unit "cubit" would have to equal a football field or more to build a boat that could hold two of everything - even when discounting fishes, flying birds, bats and dinosaurs.

Somehow I doubt that the Noah's Ark museum geting $37 million in tax breaks in Kentucky (story here) will really tackle this question.

March 14, 2011

Not much snow, lots of water

I have roughly 7 inches of snow left in my yard (depending on where you measure, there are bald patches and foot-deep spots) which isn't much. But that doesn't mean there isn't a lot of water there: I melted it down this morning to 3.2 inches of water equivalence, or darn near 2-1. No wonder it feels like blocks of ice when you walk on it!

If this sounds interesting, consider becoming a volunteer for CoCoRaHS. They're looking for more.

IPv6 is coming for a bigger Net - but slowly, slowly

My column today is about the status of IPv6, the bigger address space for the Internet. It includes an interview with the IP Manager at the UNH InterOperability Lab, who declined to give details about the results of the recent PlugFest but indicated "work needs to be done."

More Pi Day stuff than you can shake an irrational number at

New Scientist, bless its British heart, has put together a slew of Pi Day-related events and other stuff (read it here). They include this phone number (253 243-2504) which connects to a recording of the digits of pi being read. And read. And read. And read ...

March 15, 2011

Region's nuclear power sector watches, waits

I have a story in the Telegraph today about the region's five nuclear power plants - to be four next year, if the Vermont Yankee shutdown goes through - and the possible effect of the crisis in Japan. There's lots of "it's too early to tell" in it, I'm afraid. Read it here.

good prime (Nuclear Energy 101) that includes this note: "Remember, this is really just an emergency shutdown gone awry. The control rods are still in place. The Jenga columns are still separated. So, over time, the fission reactions will still slow down and stop. As they do, heat levels will drop, and so will levels of radiation.I didn't have room to get into detail about how nuke plants work and what's happening in Japan. Really, what we have here is a waiting game. The goal is to keep the reactors stabilized long enough that the shutdown can completely shut down."

The world, incidentally, has 443 operating nuclear power plants and, due largely to expansion plans in China and India, could have twice as many in a decade or two, says the NY Times.

Is this the first IPv6 deployment in New Hampshire?

Dynamic Internet in Salem is assigning IPv6 addresses, as they announce here. Is this the first retail-level IPv6 deployment in New Hampshire?

We do have earthquakes here, but barely - and no tsunamis

ADDENDUM: A reader points out that I overstated the impossiblity of tsunamis on the East Coast; check here for a report, which lists them as "rare but possible."

I have a Telegraph story today about the region's nuclear power industry, in which I make the lazy statement that New England doesn't have earthquakes. That's not true, as I well know - 5 of them have been recorded in New Hampshire already this year - but it is true that we don't have earthquakes of a scope to worry nuclear power plants. None of our quakes this year have topped magnitude 2.6, which is barely noticeable on the ground. The two biggest recorded quakes in NH history were both in 1940 near Lake Ossipee, at magnitude 5.5 - which is still well below the usual measurement of a "large" quake, magnitude 6.0. (The Japan quake was magnitude 8.9)

As for a tsunami, here's a quote from UNH geophysics professor Margaret Boettcher in response to an email query of mine: "It is also quite unlikely that the east coast will be hit by a tsunami generated by fault slip in the Atlantic because there are very few subduction zones (the type of plate boundary that Japan and Chile are on) in the Atlantic."

Here is the US Geological Survey's page on the earthquake history of New Hampshire: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/new_hampshire/history.php

March 16, 2011

Japan disaster - is it a push for "mini-nuke plants"?

Let's take a moment to recognize some true heroes - a term that is bandied about far too loosely. I mean the workers at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in Japan, roughly 50 people who have put themselves in harm's way in order to save the health and lives of millions. We can only hope to emulate those engineers, mechanics and craftsmen if the need ever arose. (Article here)

As Japan continues to struggle with the damaged nuclear plants, here's a column that says the issue may give a boost to relatively small (10 megawatt or so) self-contained reactors, which are sealed at the factory, put in place for roughly 20 years, then returned to the factor when they need refueling. The Toshiba 4S is the model. They are sodium-cooled and have enough passive cooling that if they lose power they still don't overheat.

Check this column by Robert Cringley, which also talks about how the current disaster is much less bad than Chernobyl was.

85th anniversary of Goddard's first rocket

Today is the 85th anniversary of Robert Goddard's launch of the first liquid-fueled rocket, on his Aunt Effie's farm just south of Worcester, Mass. Here's an article from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where Goddard attended and which for obvious reasons has embraced the father of rocketry's memory.

Here's a Wired.com piece, which is pretty good except it says the farm is in Connecticut. All those small New England states look the same when viewed from afar, I guess ...

NRC: Mass. nuclear plant has relatively high earthquake risk

The Nuclear Regulatory commisson says all of America's 104 nuclear power plants are prepared for earthquakes, meaning each has a better than 1 in 10,000 chance of a core breach due to an earthquake. But as Bill Dedman of MSNBC notes, the plants with the highest relative risks are all on the east coast, because the perceived lack of earthquake risk means they were built with less protection that plants in California.

Notably, No. 2 on the list is Pilgrim nuclear plant in Plymouth, Mass., between Boston and Cape Cod. It has a calculated risk of 1 in 14,493 of a core breach. (Seabrook in N.H. is No. 36 at 1 in 45,455; Vermont Yankee is No. 70, at 1 in 123,457.)

Dedman's report (you can read it here) points out that the odds of a breach has increased for most power plants because new research has raised the likelihood of earthquakes throughout the country - although it's still very low in New England.

Speaking of Pilgrim, until it was pointed out by a reader this morning I didn't realize that it, like Vermont Yankee, is trying to get its federal license renewed. For both plants, their license runs out next year. The NRC staff has given Pilgrim thumbs up for environmental and safety issues, and the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board is in the midst of hearings. The issue is likely to come up for a vote before the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission this year.

Pilgrim doesn't need state approval, however, while Vermont Yankee does, thanks to Vermont's unique set of state laws.

Rocketry remembered

I read a lot about Goddard's rocket experiments in early issues of Pop Science/Mechanics and other magazines from the 30's and 40's. I was absolutely thrilled when I was able to go to guided missile schools when I joined the Navy. Even better, my first assignment was on the USS Norton Sound, a seaplane tender converted to a missile test ship. We had hundreds of missile firings equipped with telemetry heads instead of explosive warheads.

I was assigned to the telemetry room with big multitrack Ampex tape recorders and receivers to maintain and modify according to what the civilian engineers needed. With 1/2â³ tape, 60 inches a minute and 8 tracks, we recorded everything happening in the Terrier or Tartar missiles as they headed out inside a nutating radar beam towards a target drone.

Later, I worked in one of the missile test bays where we tested the rockets before being launched.

After I got out of the Navy, I worked as a field engineer on missile launch systems and associated equipment. Then as a technical writer and teacher at the guided missile school in Mare Island, California.

Rocketry is still one of my intense interests limited now to bottle rockets using water and compressed air to launch 2 liter soda bottles a few hundred into the air. A recent thrill was touring the Cape Canaveral center here in Florida, seeing examples of little rockets like those I worked on up to the Saturn V with moon lander suspended in air a few feet above our heads. I still get a little weak in the knees thinking about how lucky I've been.

Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH Fruitland Park, FL

March 17, 2011

A (non-geeky) first for Maine

I can't find anything of geek interest from northern New England, so let's point to a first for Maine: The June issue of Playboy will have the first-ever playmate from the Pine Tree State. Her name is Mei-ling Lam and here's the Press-Herald story.

March 18, 2011

What exactly do those sewage-treatment disks do?

UPDATE: I posted an item earlier today wondering what exactly those floating disks, accidentally released from a N.H. wastewater treatment plant, do. I've since done some interviews and written a story that will run this weekend. I have replaced the earlier post with (an unedited version) of my story:

The little white disks that washed out of the Hooksett wastewater treatment plant last week and flowed down the Merrimack River, creating an unusual litter problem on the beaches of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, exist for an odd-sounding reason: to give bacteria a place to sit.

They're called Kreuger Biofilm Chips, and are made by a German firm that specializes in wastewater treatment systems. Hooksett was the first plant in the U.S. to buy them, according to Kreuger.
The plastic disks, made via injection molding, are used to increase the amount of bacteria in aeration tanks, the huge ponds hold sewage for biological break-down as part of treatment process.

"They look like honeycomb cereal, a little bigger than that," said Mario Leclerc, manager of the Nashua Wastewater Treatment plant.

Nashua does not use the disks in its treatment plant. In fact, no place in New Hampshire other than Hooksett uses them, according to the state Department of Environmental Services.

Leclerc snagged a couple of the disks during a visit to Plum Island, at the mouth of the Merrimack River. It is one of the places where tens of thousands of the disks have washed up in recent days, leading to volunteer efforts and lots of argument about who has to bear the cost.

The disks float around in aeration tanks and provide a place for helpful bacteria to grow, so the microbes can chomp on sewage floating by and break it down.

The open grid pattern of the disks increases the amount of surface area that can hold bacteria.

Kreuger says the disks have a whopping 1,200 square meters of surface area for every cubic meter of material â 200 times as much surface area as exists on similar amount of material in the shape of a cube.

Hooksett bought the disks because it wanted to upgrade the plant without the enormous expense of building bigger or more aeration ponds. Nashua uses suspended growth treatment system, which depends on the bacteria floating around in the water and sludge. There are other methods to increase bacteria counts.

"Tanks can only support so only many organisms. To get more organisms there, you have to make it bigger somehow," said Leclerc. "In other plants, they have 'fingers' attached (to the tank to increase surface area). There are all kinds of technologies."

The floating-disk method is pretty new in the U.S., which may explain Hooksett's difficulties. The treatment plant had a screen that caught the disks and kept them from getting into the Merrimack River, but heavy rains overwhelmed the system and pushed over the screen.

This isn't the first time the problem has occurred. In April of last year, a million similar disks escaped the sewage treatment plant in Groton, Conn., and washed up along nearby beaches.

March 19, 2011

The complicated story of trash-to-energy plants

Trash-to-energy plants sound, on the face of it, like a no-brainer - they get rid of something we don't want, turning it into something we do want. But they have a long history of cost overrides and pollution (trash is a real mixed bag of a fuel and it's hard to eliminate all the unpleasant byproducts). Tux Turkel at the Portland Free-Press takes a typically long, nuanced look at the issue in his state, which has four major such plants. Read it here.

March 20, 2011

Self-publishing a tech book is no way to make money

There is a general idea in the "information wants to be free" community that people who write can make a living by giving away their work, because this will increase their overall audience and as a byproduct increase the small proportion of people willing to pay for your work. Forcing everybody to pay, they opine, will just make your audience disappear and cut your income.

Slashdot pointed me to the story of one guy who tried this, with a self-published book about Ubuntu, the Linux distribution. He's an experienced, already-known writer. His result (read it here): At least 500,000 free copies have been downloaded, and in two years he has made $9,000. From the report:

I estimate I have to give away 446 copies of the eBook for every sale of the print edition. ... The book's been a success in terms of providing a free educational resource for the Ubuntu community, and I'm very proud of this achievement. But as a commercial endeavour, I wouldn't recommend anybody take a self-publishing route.

If you want to earn money from writing, write magazine journalism. If you really want to write a book, get signed to a publisher. If you want an adventure then try self-publishing. Just don't expect to do much more than cover your costs, though.

Speaking of magazine journalism, I have a freelance article for UNH Magazine to finish today ...

March 21, 2011

Deer hunting rules are an interesting bio-control mechanism

My Telegraph column today is about a proposal to institute antler point restrictions in parts of New Hampshire for parts of the deer hunting season. These would require that hunters can only kill a deer with "at least one antler 3 inches long measured from the tip of the main beam along the distal edge of the antler to the base of the antler burr at the skull, plus at least two antler points that branch from the main beam that are at least 1 inch from the tip to the confluence with the closest edge of the main beam."

Wow.

The column looks at the way hunting rules can be used to control the demographic profile of the herd - in this case, to keep down the percentage of males who are under two years old.

ADDENDUM: John Harrigan, the north country columnist for the Union-Leader, writes about it in the Sunday U-L - he thinks it's probably a bad idea, too focused on creating "trophy" animals. He's definitely closer to the hunting and Fish & Game community than I am. Read it here.

March 22, 2011

Compressed-air energy storage draws GE investment

Mass High Tech reports that West Lebanon, NH-based SustainX has gotten a $14.4 million investment from GE to further its work developing ways to store energy with compressed air. (Read it here)

The investment isn't terribly surprising, since SustainX is a partner in GE's Ecomagination Challenge, a high-profile program that GE has used a way to find R&D start-ups that might feed into its business. I've written about a couple other NH winners: IceCode (developing a quick way to shed built-up ice, as on wind turbine blades) and ElectricRoute (improving communication among utility substations).

March 23, 2011

Spotting ticks with Lyme disease ... from space?

I have a short piece in the latest UNH Magazine, a publication of the college, about ways to better predict tick populations so that people can better plan for their trips into the wild - or even into the field next door. (Read it here) One of the methods is:

(to) examine images taken by satellites that indicate forest density and patchiness, because ticks are happiest when it's not too shady and not too hot. (Researchers), along with Applied GeoSolutions of Newmarket, N.H., are using geographical information systems and remote sensing to correlate satellite data with ground observations.

One of the researchers semi-jokingly talked about the possibility of eventually having daily tick forecasts along with weather and pollen forecasts.

Lyme disease is no joking matter, however (although it's also one of those vague conditions, like chronic fatigue, to which people attach all sorts of wild claims). It is becoming a real problem in northern New England, spreading up from the southern parts of the region. Here is the NH Health and Human Services page about it.

March 24, 2011

Discovery Center: Learning about the (real) sirens of Titan

Today, 365 years ago, Christian Huygens discovered Saturn's largest moon Titan. The Huygens probe from NASA's Cassini mission parachuted down to the surface of haze-shrouded Titan six years ago, transmitting images and data that scientists are still working with today. Discovery Center Educator Mal Cameron will present a virtual exploration of Titan with what we have learned in 365 years of study as part of Super Stellar Friday at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.

The program begins at 7 p.m. Cost is $9 adults, $8 seniors & students, $6 children. Details are here.

(If you're confused by the headline, you don't know your Kurt Vonnegut. Or Scottish folkie Al Stewart, for that matter.)

Broadband network for western NH takes a first step

From a press release: New Hampshire FastRoads, LLC, an organization bringing high-speed broadband to western New Hampshire, began the first phase of its project today when it awarded a design and project management contract for the development of its regional broadband network.

Design Nine will design a next-generation fiber network that will bring high-speed broadband, including Internet access, to the Upper Valley and Monadnock Regions of New Hampshire. It will include "last-mile" network projects in Rindge and Enfield, NH, and "middle-mile" projects delivering fiber network access to 20 towns and 220 Community Anchor Institutions in the area.

Design Nine will provide network architecture design and mapping services, as well as assist FastRoads in all facets of project planning, including environmental assessment, bidding, procurement, quality assurance and regulatory permitting, among many other responsibilities. The network design will begin immediately, with construction of the first phase of the network to be completed in Spring 2012.

New Hampshire FastRoads is a Limited Liability Company (LLC) of the Monadnock Economic Development Corporation. The organization was established to bring accessible and affordable broadband to the towns of the Monadnock and Upper Valley regions of New Hampshire. NH FastRoads is partnering with Network New Hampshire Now (NNHN), a collaboration of public and private organizations to develop a high-speed broadband network throughout the state.

NH FastRoads and NNHN are funded by an economic stimulus grant and private funding to expand broadband coverage to keep the state vibrant, innovative and relevant for businesses, citizens and educational institutions. NH FastRoads' mission is to ensure that homes, businesses and institutions of the region have the best broadband infrastructure to support jobs and sustainable economic development. The organization's work will enable delivery of a variety of services such as consumer and business Internet access, voice telephony (VoIP), IP-based television, movies on demand, business class videoconferencing, health care services (e.g. in- home monitoring), home and business security, computer backup, public access television, Internet radio, and many other advanced services.

Design Nine was founded in 1987 to provide technology advice and services to community, business, and public clients. The company offers a comprehensive array of technology advisory services, telecommunications project management, and broadband design assistance. The company was selected as a Broadband Properties top 100 company in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

Pre-'Clovis' humans in North America now seem a certainty

Pretty much my whole adult life, there has been argument about how long humans have been in North America. The general idea that I learned is that we traipsed over the Bering Strait land bridge about 12,000 years ago, when sea levels were low because the Ice Age had sucked up so much water (so to speak), and then we spread like crazy. And I mean crazy: It seems likely that humans were in New Hampshire as early as 11,000 years ago, just as the glaciers were retreating. We must have sprinted the whole way from Alaska.

This scenario is often shorthand labeled "Clovis culture," named for a certain type of stone tools found near Clovis, N.M., and indicative of most of the earliest archaeological digs in the content. Most digs, but not all: There have always been hints of pre-Clovis people here and there, which is why the arguing has gone on. It has also been fertile ground for pseudo-science.

The pre-Clovis hints are now very, very strong, according to a paper in Science that finds stone-chipping societies in Texas 15,500 years ago. (Scientific America article here. Washington post article here.) If it holds up, and the coverage I've seen says it will, then at least one major scientific argument will have been settled.

So what's next? I know: where did humans evolve? Are we "out of Africa" or "multiregion development"? Mitochondrial DNA gives a real leg-up to the former, but the battle isn't over yet!

March 25, 2011

Even in white New Hampshire, Asian students flourish in the sciences

In the Telegraph newsroom, a couple of us have a tongue-in-cheek contest: Any time we get a press release about a school science or math competition, we bet whether there will be any obviously white or black or Hispanic names among the winners. Amazingly often, there aren't - the background reflected by the names will be predominantly south Asian (those mile-long Indian monikers) or east Asian (Chinese/Korean/Japanese names that you *know* aren't pronounced the way the Latin alphabet spelling makes it seem they are). The rest of the world must make do with prizes for English (not spelling, though; that's another south Asian stronghold) or stuff like debating. Or sports, of course.

A case in point: this week's education column about a Nashua middle-school Mathcounts team that got its second state title in three years. (Read it here) Not a lot of ancestors of that cheerful group came over in the Mayflower.

This is hardly news - it is well known in college, where white students semi-joke that they avoid classes with too many Asian students because that means the class will be hard - but it's particularly impressive in New Hampshire, which isn't exactly teeming with non-whites.

And it reflects how much culture matters, unless you think that half the world's population has some weird I-quantify-well gene. Their families and friends admire science and math accomplishment, so they do well in it. It's that simple ... or, rather, that difficult, because changing culture is very, very tough.

It reminds me of an interview I saw once with (if I recall correctly) Itzhak Perlman in which he was asked why so many of the world's great violinists are Jewish. Because our fingertips are circumcised! he joked before talking about how everybody admired the violin, so they all worked at it.

The state's oldest ISP is reorganizing

Â (NOTE: I misstated the situation earlier, misreading an email exchange, so I've rewritten this) MV Communications of Manchester, a small independent ISP that started way back in 1991, making it the oldest in the state and one of the longest-running in the country, is reorganizing. However, it is not shutting, as I reported earlier. "We're reorganizing and trimming down, but we're still open and providing most of our services" said an email from a company staffer. I'm on vacation, but hope to have more of a story next week.

I've written about MV a number of times over the years, most recently in 2009 when the MV.com domain name turned 21. Here's a snippet from that story:

Thus, on Feb. 3, 1988, or 21 years ago last week, (Mark Mallet of Litchfield) registered MV.com, which stood for Merrimack Valley. At about the same time, a company called The World was launched in Brookline, Mass., becoming the first company to offer dial-up Internet service to the outside world - that is, the first Internet service provider.

Mallett began to realize that it would cost too much to have full-time Internet connection instead of his "dial in every now and then" model; if he wanted to make that step, he needed paying customers. The World showed him how this could work, and in 1991 he, Marta Greenberg and David Dick created MV Communications, New Hampshire's first ISP.

That wasn't so easy, he said, because the online world was still wrestling with its proper role. Old-timers may recall the ban on commercial activity, which was thought to soil the purity of the Internet. Still, says Mallett, having a nearby precedent helped. "All you had to say was say 'The World' and they'd say, 'Oh that would be neat to have in New Hampshire' and they'd help you out," he said.

March 26, 2011

Slow but steady progress for our endangered state butterfly

The Associated Press has an article updating the status of the Karner blue buttery, an endangered insect that has been the N.H. state butterfly for years. The population in about 300 acres of protected woody scrubland near Concord has increased from 50 to 2,600, thanks to a gazillion hours of paid and (mostly) volunteer labor. Saving species if hard and complicated, and it's still far from saved. Read the story here.

March 27, 2011

I forgot about Earth Hour last night, and I bet you did, too

Earth Hour, the annual event in which people are supposed to ramp down lights for one hour to save electricity and make a gesture toward energy efficiency, drew even less attention that usual around here. (It was Saturday night at 8:30 p.m.) As I've noted in the past (e.g., here in 2009), it has never produced a noticeable drop in New England electricity usage, even when Boston officially participated. (This year, the only official participant I know of is Burlington, Vt.) I don't think I'll even ask for power-usage figures this year - no point.

The idea of Earth Hour has always seemed reasonable - there's nothing like turning off lights to make us realize how much power we use - but somehow it never has managed to shake off the aura of empty gesture.

Here's the site's main page, with articles about various cities around the world.

March 28, 2011

Making dirty water clean can be big business

Population growth and a warming planet are straining drinking-water supplies, so it makes sense that companies whose products can help the situation are in a good position. One of those appears to be Koch Membrane System of Wilmington, Mass.; the Globe reports that it has just gotten a many-millions contract in Brazil for membranes to filter sewer water so it can be reused. (The Globe story is here.) It's part of a reverse-osmosis system and, according to the story, has a cost and "footprint" advantage because it uses a few large membrane systems instead of lots of small ones. The hard part was making the large membranes.

Why are the region's insect-eating birds declining?

My column today talks about a study of New Hampshire birds which shows, among other things, that birds which insects on the fly, such as swifts and barn swallows, are declining - and nobody knows why. If you check it out, you can see the funky double-decker nest that phoebes have built in my barn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

Could firefighters battle blazes with electricity?

A study by Harvard researchers, reported at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, found that a blast of electricity could stifle flames in certain conditions, raising the idea of backpack-wearing firefighters opening "doors" in a wall of flame with their magic wands. From the report on Eurekalert:

In the new study, they connected a powerful electrical amplifier to a wand-like probe and used the device to shoot beams of electricity at an open flame more than a foot high. Almost instantly, the flame was snuffed out. ... The device consisted of a 600-watt amplifier, or about the same power as a high-end car stereo system.

But how does it work? Cademartiri acknowledged that the phenomenon is complex with several effects occurring simultaneously. Among these effects, it appears that carbon particles, or soot, generated in the flame are key for its response to electric fields. Soot particles can easily become charged. The charged particles respond to the electric field, affecting the stability of flames, he said.

Humidity Control

One of the 'features' of Florida are the extremes of heat and humidity, not to mention the bugs and lightning during the summer. Some of us, (not me) are leaving our RVs here until the next volunteer season of 2012.

I was asked to investigate dehumidifiers that would be installed in the 200 rooms of the Life Enrichment Center. One option to control humidity and decrease the mold and fungus is to run the air conditioners for three quarters of the year. The energy costs would be prohibitive and wear and tear on the equipment precludes us from doing that. Dehumidifiers are less expensive to install and electrical costs are also reduced. BUT, (there's always a but) the size of the equipment for these small rooms isn't really an option.

There are two main ways of creating a cold plate to condense moisture out of the air. One that we are most familiar with is the standard compressor, coils and fan. These work very well and are used by the millions all over the world. I have one in my basement that does wonders for the workshop.

The other option is a solid state device known as a peltier junction.

The advantages of this type of dehumidifier are, very quiet operation, usually just a computer fan to move the air across the cold junction. For the size rooms or RVs we have, a very small unit is sufficient. They are also energy efficient, drawing about as much as a 75 watt incandescent lamp as opposed to 300 watts or more for compressor units. The cost of equipment is low, $90 for one sized to our needs.

http://www.air-n-water.com/reviews/eva-dry/edv-2200

This little unit isn't nearly big enough to use at home, but for a single room, closet or closed up RV, it seems to be the right choice. I've had to modify the tank, drilling, tapping and adding a pipe nipple and tubing for continuous draining into the sink. I'll be curious to check in next year to see if I've made the right choice or should have gone with something bigger.

Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH Fruitland Park, FL

March 29, 2011

Icy water, lots of snow cut hydro, solar power output

PSNH says the ice Merrimack River reduced flow through its 16-megawatt hydropower dam at Manchester, while January's heavy snows blocked the 51-kilowatt solar farm atop the company HQ in that city, resulting in n 8 percent drop in hydropower and "mid-January through mid-February being the slowest month yet for output from the 2-year-old Energy Park PV system."

It's a reminder that every energy system has weaknesses, even tried-and-true hydropower and build-it-and-ignore-it photovoltaics.

What exposes you to more radiation: A nuke plant or a coal-fired plant?

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a calculator for estimating your daily exposure to radiation. It raises your risk by varous amounts of mrem (thousands of a rem) received annually depending on factors such as your altitude above sea level, whether you wear a luminous wrist watch, whether you have porcelain crowns, etc. The most interesting choices, however, are these two:

* Live within 50 miles of a nuclear power plant (pressurized water reactor) (0.0009 mrem)

* Live within 50 miles of a coal-fired electrical utility plant (0.03 mrem)

In other words, NRC says living near a coal-fired power plant, such as Merrimack Valley Station in Bow, N.H., exposes you to 30 times as much radiation as living near a pressurized water nuclear plant such as Seabrook Station on the N.H. seacoast. (That's assuming the nuclear plant is operating properly, of course.) Who would have guessed?

Both of these, by the way, are tiny, tiny amounts. Just living in a non-critical part of the U.S. exposes you to 2 mrem each year, and the NRC says anything less than 100 mrem of annual exposure is not worth considering.

March 30, 2011

How far does a cat's sneeze travel?

How far does a cat's sneeze travel? 1.3 meters.

At least, that's the distance that its contagious microbes go after a sneeze.

My wife learned tat at a continuing-education veterinary conference, and I thought you'd want to know. (Yet, we have a sick cat in the house. On the other hand, upstairs we have four, 4-week-old kittens that are so freaking cute I can't stand it.)

UNH news: Energy 'ribbon' in heliosphere due to galactic magnetic field (maybe)

From UNH News Service: In a paper to be published in the April 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, scientists on NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, including lead author Nathan Schwadron and others from the University of New Hampshire, isolate and resolve the mysterious "ribbon" of energy and particles the spacecraft discovered in the heliosphere â the huge bubble that surrounds our solar system and protects us from galactic cosmic rays. (Article can be read here)

The finding, which overturns 40 years of theory, provides insight into the fundamental structure of the heliosphere, which in turn helps scientists understand similar structures or "astrospheres" that surround other star systems throughout the cosmos.

The ribbon of energy was captured using ultra-high sensitive cameras that image energetic neutral atoms (instead of photons of light) to create maps of the boundary region between our solar system and the rest of our galaxy.

Notes Schwadron, an associate professor at UNH's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space and department of physics, "Isolating and separating the ribbon from the IBEX maps was like pulling the drapes from our window to discover the landscape at the edge of the solar system."

Of the singular images the IBEX mission has been able to achieve, lead scientist David McComas of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) says, "These maps are very rich scientifically and are critical in helping scientists understand how our space environment is controlled by the galactic medium. They provide the first images of our solar system's boundaries, which control the access to potentially harmful galactic cosmic rays as well as all other matter from deep space."

The most energetic galactic cosmic rays penetrate even the powerful magnetic fields closest to Earth and eventually collide and interact with Earth's atmosphere. The direct or indirect effects of these cosmic rays on the Earth system, including our biosphere, remain poorly understood and are often highly controversial.

The IBEX team is using the maps to learn how the heliosphere is shaped and what its physical properties are. This detailed information about our solar system's boundaries will allow scientists to better understand how galactic cosmic rays evolve in our space environment, which in turn will provide fundamental information about the radiation environment on Earth and its implications on the evolution of life.

The IBEX scientists analyzed data from the mission's first year of observations and, after developing an effective separation method, were able to isolate and resolve the unanticipated energetic ribbon feature. The ribbon appears to be wrapped like a belt on top of the globally distributed emissions of the broader sky, and by separating it from the background emissions scientists can now see what's underneath the ribbon.

Says Schwadron, "There are many theories about how the ribbon is created, and we don't understand exactly what we're seeing but it seems to be telling us something about how the local galactic magnetic field interacts with the heliosphere."

Additional evidence for that interaction was the discovery of a "tail" of emissions in the underlying boundary landscape, which is apparently deflected in the direction of the galactic magnetic field as the ribbon seems to indicate.

"This galactic magnetic field may be a missing key to understanding how the heliosphere protects the solar system from galactic cosmic rays," says Schwadron.

Also seen in the maps is the expected feature of the "nose" of the heliosphere. The nose represents the direction in which the solar system moves through the local part of the galaxy nearest to our Sun and that Schwadron compares to the "bow wave in front of a ship, which shows us how our motion through the galaxy compresses and deflects the material of the local galactic medium around our heliosphere."

The IBEX maps differ so radically from what was expected prior to the mission that the scientists have been struggling to untangle the vast amount of information the maps contain. The team notes that getting emissions from the nose of the heliosphere has been an important "lamp post" towards understanding how the global heliosphere is controlled by the interaction of the Sun with the local galactic medium.

Says McComas, "Prior to IBEX, most scientists believed that the global boundaries of our solar system were controlled mainly by the motion of our solar system through the galaxy and the solar wind, an extremely fast flow of electrically charged matter that flows out from the Sun. The IBEX maps reveal the galactic magnetic field is also a critical part of the Sun's interaction with the galaxy."

The mission launched October 19, 2008 and carries two ultra-high sensitivity cameras containing important components designed and built at UNH. In addition, the mission's Science Operations Center is headquartered at UNH.

UNH co-authors include Eberhard MÃ¶bius, professor of physics, and Harald Kucharek, research associate professor in the Space Science Center in UNH's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space.

March 31, 2011

Burning heating oil as a mist raises efficiency (allegedly)

The Globe has a story about a Massachusetts inventor who claims he has made a gizmo that sprays heating oil as a mist for burning, which greatly increases the efficiency of the burn. The story is reasonably cautious, with some caveats from experts, but it still sounds interesting, since northern New England is (I believe) the region that is most dependent on heating oil.

'Rock snot' found in Connecticut for the first time

Didymo, a.k.a. "rock snot", the freshwater algae that can turn streams slimy, has been found in Connecticut for the first time, reports Fly Rod and Reel magazine.

Rock snot - love that name - has been found in a few streams in the upper Connecticut River valley, but I haven't heard any reports of its spreading in N.H. Judging from its spread around the world, however, it's bound to. It has been found in Massachusetts, too.

Here's the NH Environmental Services page about it.

Discovery Center: First Shuttle landing eyewitness account

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the shuttle's first flight. On Friday at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, Following a special presentation of planetarium show Tonight's Sky at 7 p.m., New Hampshire native Tom Cocchiaro as he recounts Space Shuttle Columbia's first landings on the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base in California. 26 years old at the time, Cocchiaro had a front row seat for Columbia's first five landings, documenting the news as editor of Dessert Wings, the Base's installation newspaper. He'll show personal photos and "homemade" eyewitness videos of behind-the-scenes activities including the shuttle's landing and post-touchdown local news coverage.

April 2011

You can read my deathless prose here.

April 1, 2011

Bug-eating bats mean billions for agriculture, but not so much here

A Boston University bat expert has made an informed back-of-envelope estimate of the value of insect-eating bats to American agriculture. His number: At least $3 billion, maybe 15 times as much. He argue, quite reasonably, that this means we should be doing more to fight white nose syndrome as it moves west, devastating entire populations.

As the map on the Wired article page shows (check it out here), bats' effect on New England agriculture is pretty limited. Only the desert southwest has an equally small estimated effect.

April 2, 2011

The best April Fool's Day joke for geeks: Scientific American gives up

It's a 2005 joke (that's why I waited until April 2 to mention it) but still a good one. Read it here, or savor this takeout:

We owe it to our readers to present everybody's ideas equally and not to ignore or discredit theories simply because they lack scientifically credible arguments or facts. Nor should we succumb to the easy mistake of thinking that scientists understand their fields better than, say, U.S. senators or best-selling novelists do. Indeed, if politicians or special-interest groups say things that seem untrue or misleading, our duty as journalists is to quote them without comment or contradiction. To do otherwise would be elitist and therefore wrong.

April 3, 2011

Rising seas will cost us lots of money - like $1 billion for Mass. seawalls alone

The Globe takes a look at the state of seawalls along the Massachusetts coast, in light of the rising sea levels that are coming due to global warming. It has some pretty startling stuff, including:

veral lines of research now indicate thata 3-foot global rise by 2100 is a plausible scenario, though some scientists forecast a smaller rise. In other words, what was once a problem for our great great-grandchildren is one our children could confront. And it is possible the news could be even worse in the Northeast. Studies showthat changes in ocean circulationdriven by warming waters could raise sea levels an additional foot or more along New England shores by the end of the century.

Good thing I like mountains more than beaches.

April 04, 2011

Measuring radiation in New Hampshire

My column today talks about the various ways that New Hampshire measures radiation in our air, soil, water and even farm sileage - we have stations and sampling protocols near Seabrook and Vermont Yankee, and a federal air-sniffer in concord that's part of a federal program designed both to establish good baseline data and spot anomalies.

BU student challenges $67,500 fine for music file sharing

The case of Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum, who shared ("stole", if you prefer) 30 songs online and was sued by the recording industry, has made it to the federal appeal level. It's the first time this has happened, says the Globe (in this article). Arguments were made Monday and the appeal of a $67,500 fine taken under advisement.

Teaching the value of vaccines, through a board game

When Mary Flanagan was hired at Dartmouth as their first person to occupy their chair in Digital Humanities, I was intrigued enough to write a column in which she advocated the role of games and gaming in education. And here's just the sort of thing she talked about: A board game she helped develop that demonstrates the damage that can be done when people skip vaccines: "Players really experience how things get out of control very quickly with an unvaccinated population."

Here's the school's own story about it.

I hope to do my own story, too, but Darmouth did an excellent job without me (darn them).

April 05, 2011

Headline I hope is true: "Accidental Find May Lead to Cure for Baldness"

Nothing local I can find this morning, so let the hairline-challenged among us read this story and dream:
Accidental Find May Lead to a Cure For Baldness

UCLA scientists were studying the effect of a hormone known as corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) on stress, and say the balding mile got hairy again.

Mice aren't men, alas ... but I can dream, can't I?

A cryptozoology (Bigfoot, etc.) museum in Maine - who knew?

The Boston Globe visited the Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, that seems to exist somewhere between true believer land and skeptic city, dealing with the coelacanth as well as the yeti.

The trick is to tell the serious from the hoax, and (the owner) believes his background in social work helps. "I analyze the people involved in sightings,'' he admits. "It's all part of the investigation.''

Here's the story. Here's the website of the museum.

(Spotted via BoingBoing)

Dean Kamen turns 60 today

New Hampshire's best-known inventor turns 60 today (as I learned from Wired).

Happy birthday Dean - I hope you're still cheering on FIRST Robotics events when you're 100!

(Darn it, he's older than me - how come I don't have that much hair?)

Tabletop Geometry

I'm often amused by the assumptions people make when they don't poke their heads up to see the overall picture.

My volunteer job here at the Life Enrichment Center is hospitality host in the cafeteria. The setup is similar to thousands of cafeterias all over the world where food is served on plates placed on standard fiberglas trays. They look like a rectangle with two corners cut off to make a six sided tray. Our tables are round seating six to ten people.

I watch people arranging the trays as they sit down. Some large percentage place the trays as they should with the broad end matching the outer circumference of the table. Some though, place the narrow end facing them, thinking perhaps that they are making more room for others at the table. I've gently pointed out the advantages of broad end out and then met with amazed looks as the obvious becomes clear. It's such a simple concept. People who are 40 to 80 years old should have recognized and applied the thinking process sometimes in their life.

Perhaps its too trivial. What difference does it really make? Some small inconvenience to others only lasts for the time it takes for that one meal and no one is really paying attention. An outside observer like me is bothered by this lapse in logic only because I see it so often. Someone working in crowd control like an airport or major entertainment center must have to put with a lot of this type of unconcious behavior. I wonder how often I've done the same activity just because I didn't see the big picture.

Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH Soon to be back home

April 06, 2011

Should online retailers have to pay state sales tax?

For years there has been a debate about whether the Amazon.coms of the world should pay state sales tax. Depending on your point of view, it's either only fair because bricks-and-mortar companies pay it, or it's just another government money grab because online sales entities don't use government services the way traditional retailers do.

Massachusetts is one of many states bringing up the issue again (as the Globe reports here), spurred in part of financial problems.

I think that bricks-and-mortar retailers provide enough indirect benefits to the community - notably, local jobs - that they shouldn't be penalized. In other words, yes, sales tax should apply to online sales. It wouldn't affect us in New Hampshire, of course.

A trebuchet-building contest - and it's at an armory museum

Thanks to the success of Yankee Siege, the enormous trebuchet that dominated the world PunkinChunkin contest for five years, New Hampshire has a special relationship with these siege engines of yore. (Trebuchets throw stuff with an arm powered by a counter-weight, as compared to a catapult, which uses torsion, or a ballista, which uses bow-like springs. They're the mechanically simplist, and thus usually the largest, of pre-gunpowder weapons of mass destruction.)

The Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, Mass., a cool little museum or armor and weaponry, is giving the state a chance to show off its trebuchet chops on April 30 with a contest cleverly called Siege the Day. They want folks build a trebuchet of wood or PVC pipe, on a frame no bigger than 6-by-8-by-6 feet, and bring them to the museum for a test that involves six attempts throwing a one-pound bag of beans at targets 75 feet and 100 feet away.

From the instructions: "The sling, release mechanism and sling ropes are left to the design of the teams. No mechanical devices, such as, but not limited to springs hydraulic rams, shock cords, or air cylinders."

Sounds like fun. It's free to enter and free to watch. More instructions are here. Contact Devon Kurtz, dkurtz@higgins.org, with any questions.

May the best bean flinger win!

50th anniversary of Gagarin's flight coming up

REMINDER: THE DWC celebration is tonight.

Next Tuesday, April 12, is the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight - humanity's first tiptoe into space, if you will. Various events are being held around the world, part of a loosely organized thingamajig called Yuri's Night.

The only NH celebration I can find is in Nashua, where aeronautics and aviation students will be celebrating at Daniel Webster College as a sort of spinoff of the annual student conference for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, taking place Friday and Saturday in Nashua. (Here's the site for that conference, which is co-sponsored by the student chapters at DWC and UMass-Lowell; it features some 22 presentations about student research and 5 talks by various professionals.)

As far as Yuri's Night goes, on Friday at DWC the Gargarin fans will have a meal, varous space-related activities like a "lunar lander" egg drop, and a presentation from Team Goddard at WPI, which designed a permanent lunar base (HTML version of their presentation here). There will be, alas, no raffles for low-Earth-orbit trips, but it sounds pretty cool.

If you want to know more, contact Adam Pranaitis at DWC (pranaitis_adam@dwc.edu)

April 07, 2011

Maine's wireless smart power meters move ahead, despite silly fears

The Maine Public Utilities Commission says Central Maine Power can go ahead with its plan to place wireless meters in customer homes, an important first step to creating time-of-day pricing and other aspects of a less wasteful electricity grid, even though a few people have convinced themselves that the signals are somehow harmful to their health. Here's the Press-Herald story.

This isn't the end of the silly kerfuffle, however. The Maine legislature is still considering bills prodded by objections, including one that would let people opt out of the plan.

A single chart shows the staggering amount of energy we waste

If you want a poke-in-the-eye illustration of how much energy is wasted in the U.S., check out the superb illustration put together by Lawrence Livermore labs. It's a flow chart for energy use that demonstrates not only how little is produced by renewable resources (coal, oil and natural gas dwarf everything else) but also how much of it is wasted: 54.6 quads is labelled "rejected energy" (e.g., waste heat from power plants) while only 40 quads is "energy services" (e.g., gasoline burned by your car).

I spotted it via this Grist article.

Check it out, and shake your head in dismay. Then go home and put more insulation in your attic.

April 09, 2011

'Crazy breathing' and mystery footsteps - why, it must be ghosts!

It's not easy filling all those cable channels on TV, which explains why "ghost hunter" shows exist, because no rational human being could be entertained or enthralled by people waving around electronics meters and pretending that some of the numbers they encounter mean something about ghosts, or something like that.

Apparently that assessment is wrong, however: At least 50 people liked watching some of these goofballs tramping around Fort Knox in Maine, or so reports the Bangor Daily News.

You'll be astonished to learn that these publicity hounds didn't find any evidence of ghosts, but heard spooky footsteps and "crazy breathing." Vast wasteland, anybody?

April 10, 2011

Raising tropical fish from eggs - in Maine?

We had tropical fish when I was a kid, so I can't get on too much of a high horse about the hobby, but it is definitely a bad thing from the point of view of the world's ecology. Virtually all the fish in fish stores and tanks are caught in the wild, which means our pet-owning whims can damage populations - as if ocean acidification, reef bleaching and ocean warming isn't bad enough.

The only reasonable hope is to grow the fish from eggs in captivity. The Portland Press-Herald has a story about a company doing that - in Maine, of all places. (Read it here) They are raising clownfish (as in "Finding Nemo") and dottybacks, although after several years they're still having issues, ranging from figuring out the best way to feed them, to finding ways to heat water without spending a fortune.

The story says why this is a good idea:

Ninety-five percent of the 1,500 saltwater tropical fish species sold for use in home aquariums are collected in the wild from coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean, such as those off the Philippines and Indonesia. They are harvested by divers who use dynamite or squirt a poisonous solution to stun the fish, killing already fragile coral and other non-target organisms. The mortality rate among wild-caught fish is 80 to 90 percent even before they land in the pet store, and about 50 to 60 percent of the initial survivors after that.

April 11, 2011

Long-distance calls over the Internet; like magic, but vaguely worrisome

My daughter is in Africa at the moment. We called her via AT&T and it cost $150 - gulp! So we've set up a Google Voice account so we can talk to her cell-phone for about 1/20th as much. Talk about a disruptive technology.

I must admit that part of me is slightly worried about voice-over-Internet from a business point of view - I'm concerned it is undermining the income which allowed a worldwide phone system (lines, switches, maintenance and installation staff) to be created in the first place. Obviously there is a lot of waste and unnecessary expense and monopoly-enabled froth in telecommunications, but is the consumer cost really 95% unnecessary? That doesn't seem plausible, which implies that a switch to this form of calling will start eating the seed corn of the entire structure, leading to weakness and failure down the road.

Or maybe not. Parts of Africa are demonstrating how wireless phones are leapfrogging the system that we built in the western world, bringing voice and data to remote places, and to poor people in cities, a zillion times faster than the traditional wires-on-poles route. So maybe a slow collapse of the system that has worked so brilliantly for 100 years would be no big deal.

The parallels to my industry - newspapers are dying; is that good or bad for journalism and democracy? - are obvious.

Save the timber rattlesnake! (A rallying cry that will take some massaging)

The only poisonous snake in Northern New England is the timber rattlesnake, which despite the fearsome-sounding name is a shy reptile. Its New Hampshire population is so small that officials won't say where the state's only group lives, for fear that the news would draw exotic-pet fanciers and/or haters, with bad results.

Vermont's population is also tiny, so small that, as the Burlington Free Press reported recently,conservation and state groups have launched a study to determine their numbers and methods to preserve them. From the story:

Until 1971, the state paid a bounty for people to kill the snakes. In an extreme turnabout of attitude, 16 years later Vermont added timber rattlers to the state endangered-species list and made it illegal to kill or harass them. Although the snakes might once have been found as far north as Milton in the Champlain Valley, they now are con

fined to a warm pocket of Rutland County where rocky ledges provide denning and basking sites.

You can read it here. New Hampshire Fish and Game info sheet on the handsome critter can be seen here.

April 12, 2011

From a classroom to a Mayan burial site

My Telegraph column this week is about a Nashua guy who was intrigued by an archaeology class in high school, and a decade and a half later is part of ongoing work in northeast Guatemala that recently uncovered the oldest royal Mayan tomb ever found. You never know where education will take you.

You can read the column here.

50 years of manned space flight: It's Yuri's Night

ADDENDUM: Wired.com has a cool article about doctored photos from the Soviet space era, in which various people were airbrushed out of photos because they misbehaved, died, or otherwise ran afoul of authorities. Read it here.

A half-century ago, the Soviets launched Yuri Gargarin into orbit, freaking out the U.S. and launching the space race for real. There's a worldwide celebration (Yuri's Night), considerable what-iffing (What if the US had done it first?) and plenty of where-do-we-go-from-here ("Forget Space Flight: It's Just a Dream")

On the 50th anniversary of Sputnik I interviewed a bunch of people who remembered where they were when that news broke, including this tidbit from a Russian I met in Siberia, a Russian food store on Main Street in Nashua:

He said he was in his early 20s in Moscow when the news broke, but I can't really quote him because he decided to hide his name. "You can use a pseudonym," he suggested, in what appears to be some leftover paranoia from a Soviet childhood despite decades living in the U.S. He told me the launch was as big a surprise to Muscovites as it was to Americans, because the Soviets had withheld all news of their launch attempts until they had a success to report. Exploding rockets never showed up on the front page of Pravda, it seems. By the time the Apollo program made it clear the Soviets were being outdone, he added, news of the space race had disappeared."

Using the Infinite Corridor and toilet paper, students break paper-folding record

From a story in Boston.com:

Using more than two miles of toilet tissue and one infinite corridor at MIT, a group from St. Mark's School claim to have wiped out the world record for folding paper Sunday. The group of 15 students and teacher James Tanton from the boarding school in Southborough claim to have folded 13,000 feet of toilet paper in half 13 times (with each fold in the same direction), which would break the record of 12 times set in 2002.

Read the story here.

April 13, 2011

The American flag and laundry are not the same thing, thinks NH legislature

Last year the New Hampshire legislature declined to pass bills that would prevent homeowners associations from banning outdoor laundry - a proposal pushed by Project Laundry List, which argues that outdated concern about aesthetics fprces people to use energy-hogging clothes dryers when it isn't necessary. The legislators said they didn't want to interfere with private contracts signed by homeowners and associations.

When it comes to American flags, however, it might be different. After a woman complained that her condo association wouldn't let her fly a flag, it seems likely that the House and Senate will pass a bill saying that nobody can prevent you from flying a flag around your home, although "reasonable restrictions regarding the size of the flag or the manner in which the flag is displayed may be adopted and enforced."

Here's the Union-Leader article about the bill.

I suspect some Project Laundry List folks will find this distinction hypocritical, but I also suspect that most people would be comfortable with it.

Yuri's Day in Moscow

As might be expected, they got very excited about the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight in Moscow ... here is BoingBoing's post about it, which has nice photos and a video.

ADDENDUM: Wired.com has a cool article about doctored photos from the Soviet space era, in which various people were airbrushed out of photos because they misbehaved, died, or otherwise ran afoul of authorities. Read it here.

April 14, 2011

Heating with wood - something New England needs to do more of

The annual Heating with Wood conference starts today in Manchester. It's an industry fair, with folks peddling everything from umpty-son woodchip silos to the machines that wrap plastic around pallet-loads of wood pellets. I wrote an advance, with photos of the new wood-fired boiler heating system at Mascenic High School, for the Telegraph: You can peruse it here.

This is the website for the conference.

Heating with wood will never replace heating with oil in New England, but it sure could make a dent in that expensive, environmentally not-so-hot practice.

April 15, 2011

Going really, really (really!) fast on Bonneville Salt Flats

My column this coming Monday quantifies how much gas you can save by going slower on the highway (here's a quickie video promo to whet your appetite, or perhaps make you contribute to my Buy Dave A Toupee fund). To show that I'm not a complete killjoy, I'm now going to link to a Burlington Free Press story about a Vermont native who just broke 300 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats.(Read it here)

A quote from the driver, comparing it to rules-laden operations like NASCAR: "You can build and you can fabricate your own design. That's what really appealed to me about Bonneville, that and the fact that the landscape is very foreign."

The story says he hit 200 mph in his handmade machine, open wheel and open cockpit, but hitting 300 required closing it up to reduce drag

Discovery Center: Using data from NASA satellites

Kevin Hanley, graduate student in the department of Earth Sciences at the University of New Hampshire, will discuss how data gathered by NASA satellites is used in his research, as well as investigations by other scientists at UNH. It's part of Super Stellar Friday at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, tonight (Friday, April 15) in Concord.

It starts at 7 p.m. Details are here.

How do you calculate the value of the stuff Smaug the dragon is sleeping on?

As Tolkein fans know, Smaug the dragon of "The Hobbit" fame slept on a lot of gold and diamonds before Bilbo did his burglarizing best. Forbes magazine decided to calculate exactly how much that stuff was worth, in order to place Smaug in their annual list of 15 richest fictional characters. (Smaug was No. 7, behind Scrooge McDuck and Jed Clampett, but ahead of Mr. Monopoly and C. Montgomery Burns, among others.)

The writer included a very amusing discussion of how he arrived at the monetary calculation of Smaug's horde, including the estimate that the dragon's breast was covered with 38,900 arrow-deflecting diamonds. You can read it here.

April 16, 2011

Hybrid formula racing returns to N.H., thanks to Dartmouth

The 5th annual Formula Hybrid Competition is May 1-4 at New Hampshire International Speedway, with 33 college/industry teams from around the world. The contest is based on the long-running Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) in which students build scaled-down races and compete for design, acceleration, handling, and endurance. The difference with this one is the hybrid aspect, which complicates things enormously. (I covered the first year, and most of the entries couldn't even run that year.)

It is the geekiest of bending-metal geek fests: Car nuts crossed with people who think a good argument involves capacitors vs. lithium-ion batteries. Check out the release from Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, which hosts the event: The release is here.

Ig Nobel star (a Nobel laureate, too) dies at age 91

If you've ever attended (at Harvard), listened to (on NPR's Science Friday) or seen (online) the annual Ig Nobel award show, you've seen William Lipscomb, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1976. His clarinet playing, string bow tie and willingness to don funny hats made him the classic wicked-smart-guy-who-liked-poking-fun-at-himself persona that the Igs celebrate to the hilt.

How smart was he? Three of his doctoral students also won Nobel prizes - that's saying something.

Alas, Lipscomb has died, although since he reached 91 we should celebrate a life well lived, rather than merely mourn.

Here isthe NY Times obituary, which in a bit of journalistic misjudgement doesn't mention the IgNobels until the end. But it does nicely summarize his award-winning work: "Dr. Lipscomb's research involved developing X-ray diffraction techniques, usually used as a tool in physics, that allowed him to map the connection of the atoms in an important but puzzling group of compounds called boron hydrides."

April 18, 2011

Slowing down from 70 to 60 mph saves ... wow, 20% in mpg!

My Telegraph column today, with accompanying video (oh, what a Brave New World we newspaperman are floundering in!) talks about a small test I did on the local freeway, driving in cruise control at 60 mph and then 70 mph to quantify the difference in gas mileage. It was pretty surprising: 20 percent. I have an old hybrid, and this was a small sample, so Your Mileage May Vary, quite literally.

PSNH says underground/underwater wouldn't work for huge hydropower line

There has been much debate in New Hampshire about the plan by PSNH's parent company and HydroQuebec to run a 1,200-megawatt DC power line down through the state, to bring electricity from huge dams in Quebec to Boston and other parts of New England. There is much opposition to big, ugly power lines (these DC towers are enormous; we have a set here in southern NH) in the North Country.

One idea is to run it down the length of the Connecticut River - but PSNH says the river is too shallow for that to work. The Union-Leader has a story here.

There are also hopes that they lines might be buried, but costs mean that idea is "too fanciful ... to require detailed analysis," claims the utility.

April 19, 2011

IRS says e-filing of tax returns ends Apr. 15 rush at post offices

From the Union-Leader today:

According to the IRS, 101 million e-filed returns were received by Monday morning â an 8.8 percent increase from last year. It was the first time that more than 100 million had filed electronically in any given year since the e-file program went national in 1990, the IRS said.

In fact, most post offices no longer extend hours to accommodate the rush of procrastinators who used to pack in at the very last minute on Tax Day, which was moved from April 15 to April 18 because Emancipation Day, celebrated in Washington, D.C., fell on Friday.

This is, of course, not good news for the cash-strapped postal service. At least they still have Netflix envelopes to deliver!

April 20, 2011

A normal 'ice-out' this year

Last year, Lake Winipesaukee had the earliest "ice-out" on record - by several days, in fact. It was a real outlier, or (shudder) a sign of warmer things to come. This year was more normal, reports the Union-Leader (read it here)

This was a fabulous winter for ice - it was nice and cold but snow-free before Christmas, so we did more pond skating, and on lovely flat, slick ice, than I ever have.

Verizon finds a whole lot less - or maybe a little more - data theft loss

Thanks to the Telegraph copy desk, I was alerted to an interesting article on threatpost.com about head-scratchingly odd data released by Verizon, which says Verizon found "a stunning 97% drop in the number of lost records, even as the number of reported breaches rose precipitously."

Maybe this means that Verizon is better at protecting its data. Maybe it means ways of measuring data loss is flawed and the bad guys have found invisible ways to be bad. Maybe it means ... er, something else.

Here's the article, with lots of links.

First pitch at Phillies game was thrown by a robot

Even this isn't enough to make three hours spent watching 18 men in stretch pajamas chase a ball of string interesting, but still: The first ball at the Phillies-Brewers game was "thrown" by a robot, basically a three-jointed mechanical arm on a Segway base. Here's the story.

April 22, 2011

Shop Radiant Heating

My shop has in-floor radiant heating. It's a massive slab, thicker than most floors so the thermal properties cause quite a lag when I'm going to be working on my projects. I have some heavy metal working machines and I didn't want any floor cracks, especially with the heating tubing embedded in the concrete. A wall mounted thermostat, on 3/8" plywood would again cause a lag in response.

My 'fix' is to use an ordinary spring-wound timer to run the furnace for some period of time to give me the amount of heating I want. Since I know what the outside temperature will be from the weather forecast and I know what the starting temperature will be, I can estimate how much heat will be required to be comfortable.

First thing in the morning, if I know I'll be spending some happy hours in the shop, I'll go down and set the timer for 1 to 3 hours of heating. By the time I'm ready to go to work, the shop is up to 65 degrees or so, comfortable with heat coming from the floor. My feet are warm, so I'm warm enough.

There is a similar method used by some heating systems called an 'Outdoor Reset Control'. This control has an outside temperature sensor that modifies the furnace response to a call for heating. The colder the outside is, the sooner the furnace will turn on. The result is a more even and comfortable home environment for the occupants. I'm doing the same thing but manually judging what I'll need. It works well and has for the past many years. Another advantage is that when I'm not home, the furnace zone for the shop is absolutely off. Most thermostats only go down to about 50 degrees.

Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH

April 23, 2011

Ash Tree Treasure

I just had four Ash trees taken down on the street in front of the house. The biggest was 21" in diameter and on counting the rings, was 88 years old. So far, I've taken 5 truckload of firewood over to the temporary woodpile after cutting to length and splitting in place. Those big 16" long cylinders are heavy! One of the trees has in internal dark brown discoloration inside, centered on the middle and looking like a multi-lobbed starfish. I've tried to find out what this is, but it's not Ash decline or caused by the dreaded Ash Emerald Borer beetle.

Whatever it is, it affects the strength of the wood, noticeable when I'm running the power splitter. To the good, turning bowls of this affected wood reveals a beautiful pattern, contrasting with the often plain appearance of Ash.

Counting the rings, it is obvious that the trees were stressed some years. Either from drought or shading from other trees, there would be a period of 5 or more years when the growth rings were very close together. Other years, the growth rings might be Â¼" in width indicating good weather conditions. If I was a little more ambitious, I could match ring width to historical weather. This is how archaeologists can trace weather patterns back through centuries, taking timber from old buildings and other places and building a weather history going back centuries.

I've seen discs of Redwood and Joshua trees in museums with ID tags going back before the birth of Christ. Those large slices of history are invaluable to determine if our present weather patterns are a normal deviation lasting just a few years or is indicative of a long term slide toward global warming. Either way, more information is a good thing.

Anyway, my home heating via wood stove is solved for the next three years or so. I still have firewood left over from the big ice storm a couple of years back. My biggest problem now is where to put this bulky and heavy fuel.

April 24, 2011

The Oil Drum

The present rise in oil and gasoline prices are being blamed on everything from the North African political changes to speculators to greed of the oil companies. There are lots of opinions about why this is happening. Any search of the internet or watching cable news will allow you to find just about any version of the truth. Whatever your political slant, you can find a source that will reinforce your view of the world. Accurate information is hard to come by.

There is one internet blog that seems to have the most up-to-date and accurate information. The Oil Drum has contributors who work within and outside the energy industry. All their postings are archived so that if you wish, you can trace the history of energy production. You can see how the mix, including alternative sources will figure in the future of how we will heat our homes and power our cars.

Highly recommended.

http://www.theoildrum.com/

Earle Rich Mont Vernon, NH

April 25, 2011

Who should have access to doctors' prescription data?

Vermont is having a legal battle over who can control information about prescriptions - pharmaceutical companies or physicians. (We're talking about data that, in theory, has individual patient information removed, although as has been determined in this surprising/scary test, you can tease out people from "anonymized" data with suprising ease.)

From the Gannett storyin the Burlington Free-Press: "Vermont's law, similar to measures in Maine and New Hampshire, prohibits pharmacies from selling prescription information for drug marketing without a physician's consent. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit declared the law an unconstitutional restriction on commercial speech. A separate U.S. appeals court upheld the similar New Hampshire law." The companies say having the data allows them to provide better information about drugs to doctors, while others say it just lets them ramp up marketing regardless of health benefits. (Read the story here)

Here's the NY Times version.

Seabrook nuclear plant expects the ocean will be 1.5 feet higher by 2050

The tsunami in Japan startled a lot of us with a demonstration of how freaking powerful the ocean can be. The videos of the waves didn't look as scary or last as movie tsunamis do, but the water just kept coming and coming and coming, destroying anything and everything.

One side effect has been that the idea of a rising sea due to climate change has become much, much more frightening.

It's particularly frightening to nuclear power plants on the coast (as are most of them, to take advantage of the ocean for cooling). Seabrook Station, New Hampshire's only nuclear power plant, is taking a look at what it needs to do to lessen the risk - NHPR has a good report: "With funds from the New Hampshire DES, the Rockingham Planning Commission conducted a study two years ago in Seabrook. That study recommended Seabrook plan for a 3 to 5 feet mean sea level rise by the year 2100, and at least 1.5 feet by mid-century."

You can read it here.

Dog trained to sniff out invasive mussels

If dogs can be trained to sniff out contraband, why can't they find invasive zebra and Quagga mussels? That's the idea behind a dog trainer in California who says her dogs can sniff a boat and detect whether an invasive mussel is clinging to it in a hidden spot.

Caution: all I know is this TV news report, which presents the sort of in-depth analysis that you expect from local TV (i.e., none). Sounds intriguing, however.

April 26, 2011

Learning while commuting isn't so easy

In my years of doing a 40-minute commute, I've gotten tired of radio and my iPod, so I sometimes try those Great Courses on CDs, taken from the local library. It seems like an obvious winner: Fill empty time with something that will keep my neurons from fading away.

I have found, however, that for whatever reason, I can't learn truly new stuff while driving. I can fill gaps in existing knowledge as long as they're not very big gaps, but that's about it.

In other words, I can only listen to lectures to topics I already know alot about: the history (not musical theory) of jazz, their science topics (dinosaurs, classical physics, etc., none of which go very deep), or "The History of the Cold War," which I just finished. Hey, I lived through that history, of course I know it!

On the other hand, my days with "The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas" were a dud. I zoned out of half of it, suddenly realized that an entire track had gone by and I had no idea what the lecturer said. My knowledge of Aquinas' philosophy consisted of a few sentences before I began, and the same few sentences now.

So I guess I won't try to get my MBA while commuting, after all ...

Fanboy alert: Steven Chu is coming to NH! Woo-hoo!

Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the only science Nobel laureate ever to sit in the presidential Cabinet, is coming to New Hampshire on Thursday. He and the governor will say who is getting money from UNH's Green Launching Pad startup-funding program.

The tentative schedule is that he'll be at EnerTracin Hudson, a remote-sensing firm that is building a niche in energy reduction, at 11:30 a.m. (Hmmm ... will I be drummed out of the New Hampshire Press Association if I ask for his autograph?) Later, he'll go to an energy symposium at Dartmouth (details here).

Incidentally, this description from Chu's Nobel autobiography will make any researcher quiver with envy. This is how science is supposed to be:

I joined Bell Laboratories in the fall of 1978. I was one of roughly two dozen brash, young scientists that were hired within a two year period. We felt like the "Chosen Ones", with no obligation to do anything except the research we loved best. The joy and excitement of doing science permeated the halls. The cramped labs and office cubicles forced us to interact with each other and follow each others' progress. The animated discussions were common during and after seminars and at lunch and continued on the tennis courts and at parties. ... Bell Labs management supplied us with funding, shielded us from extraneous bureaucracy, and urged us not to be satisfied with doing merely "good science." My department head, Peter Eisenberger, told me to spend my first six months in the library and talk to people before deciding what to do.

April 27, 2011

After 259 hours in space, a visit to Aerospacefest in Concord

Manchester native Lee Morin, anstronaut who flew on STS-110 Atlantis, the 13^th shuttle mission to the International Space Station, and has logged over 259 hours in space, will speak at noon as part of the second annual Aerospacefest at McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center.

The event starts Friday night the observatory open, a skywatch event and a program titled "50 Years of US Human Space Flight".

Saturday will have activities including helicopter rides, rocket launches, an all-new planetarium show, aviation and space exhibitors from all over New England, Battlefield Laser Tag, Bungie Run, Human Gyroscope, cookout food, face painting, balloon animals, Mad Science, space memorabilia appraisals with One Giant Leap, Inc., animal encounters with Granite State Zoo, and much more. Full details are here.

Friday admission prices are $10 adult, $9 senior/student, $8 child and groups of 15 or more. Saturday admission prices are $15 adult, $13 seniors/student, $11 children and groups of 15 or more. Members receive $2 off each person in their party according to membership level. No Library Passes, ASTC, or other discounts accepted.

Giant microwave oven to dry coal wasn't a good business plan

The Telegraph has a story about a Nashua firm that makes microwave components, which has emerged from bankruptcy by slashing staff and dumping contracts. The interesting thing to me is that The Ferrite Co. foundered largely because it spent tons of money developing giant microwave ovens to dry out coal and make it usable - a technology that never panned out. It's a cautionary tale about pushing the envelope.

Nobel laureate tells all about RNA today at St. Anselm College

Craig Mello, 2006 winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, will give a talk today (Wednesday, April 27) at St. Anselm College in Manchester that's titled "RNAi: from Mystery to Mechanism, or How a Worm Won Six Nobel Prizes." His talk, at 3 p.m., is free and open to the public ... darn it, why do I have to be at work?

The talk will precede an annual poster session by college science students.

Here are the details.

State's oldest ISP, MV.com, is shutting down

I reported this news prematurely last month, but now (alas) it is true: MV Communications, the state's oldest Internet Service Provider (it started w-a-a-a-y back in 1991 and the domain name was registered in the positively prehistoric 1988) is shutting. Here's a company wiki page, which doesn't explain exactly why they're shutting, although it contains the financially ominous word "liquidation."

Among the things that are ending immediately are dial-up service, Usenet news and UUCP, which the wiki notes, sadly, was "our first service."

I hope that the always personable co-founder, Mark Mallet, will talk about it with me later.

April 28, 2011

Harbor seal survey hits the coast in Maine, Cape Cod

Seals have become a problem on parts of the west coast, congregating to the point that they annoy boaters and/or do harm to the local fish population, but we don't seem to have that issue in the Northeast. But there's a lot we don't know about the region's seals - hence a new survey of seals in Maine and Cape Cod that's going to take place during the pup-raising period of May and June. Animals will be tagged, weighed, and observed, as compared to annual counts made from the air, which constitute the bulk of our current knowledge.

The work is being overseen by NOAA's Woods Hole Laboratory. From a press release: "We don't know how many harbor seals there are in New England because most seal surveys focus on one specific area or location, but we do know that local populations have grown in size during the last few decades, and have changed in many ways, especially in southern New England and Nantucket Sound. ... The 2011 seal survey is also part of a larger, multi-year survey of marine mammals, sea turtles and seabirds along the entire U.S. East Coast which the NEFSC is leading on behalf of four federal agencies.

April 29, 2011

Extreme weather: Lake Champlain hits all-time high water level

Northern Vermont and New Hampshire had some serious flooding this week, although nobody was killed and it pales in comparison to the extreme weather they've had in the south. Check out some video from Burlington here, where Lake Champlain hit an all-time high water level yesterday.

If I was the sort of person who freaked out about End Times of Mayan Prophecies of the End of the World, all these quakes and storms would have me speaking in tongues.

Whether there's a connection to global climate change is, of course, uncertain.

April 30, 2011

New England will have enough electricity this summer

ISO-New England, the organization that oversees New England's power grid, says we will have enough electricity generation this summer even if we get another record-breaking heat wave, as in 2010. From the release:

Following a 2010 summer that broke several records, 2011 demand is predicted to peak at 27,550 megawatts (MW) under normal summer weather conditions of about 90 degrees Fahrenheitâslightly higher than last year's actual peak of 27,102 MW. If New England were to experience extreme weather conditions, such as an extended heat wave of about 95 degrees, peak consumption could rise to 29,695 MW. New England's total capacity is 32,980 MW.

The all-time record for peak demand in New England was set on August 2, 2006, when consumer demand reached 28,130 MW. One megawatt of electricity can power approximately 1,000 homes.

Vermont Yankee produces about 620 MW, so even if it shuts down abruptly we've got enough production capacity.

May 2011

http://improbable.com/2011/04/25/scientists-et-al-sing-improbable-science-songs/

May 1, 2011

Canadian firms give boost to wind-power giant, First Wind of Boston

A business arrangement that gives First Wind of Boston "seriously needed financing" has been reached with Ontario-based Algonquin Power and Utilities Corp. and Halifax-based Emera Inc., reports the Bangor Daily News. You can read the whole story here.

Maine newspapers do a good job of covering large scale wind-power because Maine, with three large farms operating and a fourth getting close, is far and away the windpower leader in the Northeast. (Check my Google Map of Northeast alternative energy for more details) First Wind, which shelved an IPO last year because of the recession, is pushing for several other sites along Maine ridgelines.

May 2, 2011

Funny science songs and other Ig Nobel silliness â tonight

If you're a certain kind of geek, then Tom Lehrer is the greatest songwriter of the age - a cross between Gilbert and Sullivan, the class clown in your high school chemistry lab, and the Annals of Improbable Research. (Check out this great animation of Lehrer's "The Elements" song.)

So it's appropriate that the Annals will host of evening of songs from Lehrer and some Ig Nobel Prize mini operas. It's tonight in Cambridge, Mass., at 7:30 p.m., a benefit for the Catalyst Collaborative@MIT Science Theater Project

Tunes include The Elements; Lobachevsky; Stress Analysis of a Strapless Evening Dress; the mini-opera Atom & Eve; The Coffee Diet, and much more! Frank Wilczek (Nobel physics prize winner) & Teresa Winner Blume (soprano), Deborah Henson-Conant (jazz harpist, Museum of Burnt Food), Roberta Gilbert (mezzo-soprano), David Frieze (baritone), Debra Wise (Underground Railway Theater), Ben Sears & Brad Conner (cabaret), Thomas Michel (accordionist), and many more!

Be there or be square.

Photo by Portland State University. A pipe clogged with zebra mussels. http://www.clr.pdx.edu/projects/volunteer/zebra.php

Is there any hope of keeping zebra mussels from spreading?

Zebra mussels, those nasty, intake-pipe-clogging bivalves, were first spotted in the U.S. in 1988 in the Great Lakes, and despite tons of effort, time and money, have slowly spread throughout the country's fresh waters. They showed up in a western Massachusetts lake last year, their first New England appearance, and that state is spending $71,000 this year (up from $5,000 last year) on boat-cleaning and educational programs, in an attempt to keep them being carried inadvertently to other lakes and rivers by boaters.

This same approach has been taken for a variety of aquatic invasive weeds, and to be perfectly honest it hasn't worked all that well. Slowing down the spread seems to be about the best we can do.

Still, I guess you have to try. Here's a Berkshire Eagle story about the program.

Here's background info on zebra mussels.

Hanta Virus found in Somerset County, Maine

This from my brother who works at Acadia National Park in Maine.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/diseases/hanta/hps/

Those of us with woodpiles outside are used to clearing out mouse nests as we reach the rows as spring approaches. Here's another thing to worry about as we move our wood inside.

There was a lot more information in the message given to the National Park Service, but on reading the fine print about distribution, I chickened out and am just providing the link for more info.

May 3, 2011

Spring is here - I got my first poison ivy

I did some trailwork last weekend on part of the Wapack Trail, organized by Friends of the Wapack. (Liberal guilt mixed with post-winter outdoorsyness.) I only did brush cutting and I wore gloves and long sleeves ... but even so, I got poison ivy on both of my forearms. Not too bad, but annoying.

For my money, the most depressing scientific finding from increased CO2 in the atmosphere is that it will make poison ivy itchier and faster growing (as reported here). I am, alas, susceptible to the ^%$# stuff, and it isn't getting any better with age.

The wonderful Straight Dope column has a great summary of people's variable susceptibility to poison ivy - read it here.

It's the 31st birthday of spam! (not the meat-type substance)

The first spam, a DEC marketing staffer's email sent around the old ARPANet, was launched on this day in 1978, as I reminded by the Telegraph's weirdly entrancing feature called daily TWIP - read the item here. (TWIP stands for The Week in Preview, an every-Monday print feature about a few upcoming items in the Nashua region; the daily version is a quirky "today in history" tidbit that lands around noon; it is designed, I think, to break up the crime-and-courts items that dominate breaking news on a newspaper website during the day.)

In case you doubt TWIP, note that the guy who ordered that first spam has his own wikipedia article, with several links to articles about him in more traditional publications. Talk about a bittersweet sort of fame.

Massachusetts has 45 megawatts of solar installed

Massachusetts has about 45 megawatts of solar energy installed, and an additional 40 megawatts contracted for installation, according to this article from Earth Techling. That's about, oh, 20 times the amount in New Hampshire, by my estimate. It also puts it just about in the top 10 states, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association as reported by the NY Times' Green blog.

May 4, 2011

The search for cottontail-saving scrubland is on

Saving the endangered New England cottontail requires not just breeding more of them in zoos and releasing them into the wild, but getting the right kind of wild land to release them into. Hence a state program looking for people to help shape their property into the sort of scrubby lands that little rabbits like.

My Telegraph column this week covers the topic: Check it out here.

There's a long-abandoned gravel quarry near me that is growing back ... it would be perfect.

The start of NASA's press release about Alan Shepard's 1961 flight. Note the phone number

May 5 is 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's flight

NASA has created a nice interactive feature, in preparation for the 50th anniversary of Alan Shepard's flight. His sub-orbital parabola was a hasty response to Yuri Gargain's orbits, 23 days earlier, but it showed that the U.S. wasn't as far behind in the space race as it might have seemed.

Check out the NASA site here.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from gobbledygook

We just had a newspaper staff meeting - which, like all newspaper staff meetings for the past couple of years, mostly concerned how to deal with the online world - and during it I heard myself say "GraniteGeek automatically tweets all its posts." As soon as those words left my mouth, I realized that the sentence would have been absolute and complete gobbledygook during 95 percent of my career.

Consider this a variation of Arthur C. Clarke's third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from gobbledygook.

On the other hand, "etaoinshrdlu" is gibberish to anybody under age 45, so maybe the rule is time-agnostic: Any sufficiently outdated technology is also indistinguishable from gobbledygook.

>May 5, 2011

A swarm of micro-quakes in mid-coast Maine

As many as 30 "microquakes", registering less than 2 on the Richter scale, have been reported in recent days in the area of the Maine coast near Acadia National Park. Nothing alarming or too surprising, say geologists, but interesting.Here's a Bangor Daily News story.

>May 6, 2011

Maine study says put wind turbines farther from homes

From the Portland Press-Herald: "The minimum distance between homes and commercial wind turbines in Maine should be nearly doubled to 1,000 feet to limit the impacts of noise on residents, a long-awaited state report is recommending.

"The report also serves as a primer on the complex study of wind noise. It summarizes the types of sound, such as the "whooshing" associated with the pressure from blades slicing through the air, as well as low-frequency noise and even "infrasound," which is below the common limit of human perception. Also explored is wind shear, a measure of how speed increases with height, and a common source of complaint when the wind is blowing stronger at the turbine hub than on the ground."

Read the story here.

Improbable Research After Dark - goofy science galore!

The Central Square Theater in Cambridge will host "Improbable Research After Dark" tomorrow (Saturday, May 7) which in the words of the always-trustworthy Annals of Improbably Researchm, features "dramatic, two-minute-long readings" from winners of Ig Nobel prizes, "performed by some of the Boston area's leading scientists, actors, and journalists."

Although with its slightly stuffy motto that "These are studies that make people laugh, then think." the announcement includes this:

WARNING: Do not come to this event if you are easily offended by anything.

The show starts at 11 p.m., and follows a presentation of the play "Breaking the Code," about Alan Turing.

You can read the piece here.

>May 7, 2011

Mice, more than deer, are villains in the Lyme/tick story

The Boston Globe has a good piece about the complicated life cycle of the tick, in which it notes that the spread of the white-footed mouse is at least as important as the spread of deer, which casts doubt on whether deer-hunting programs instituted in some Massachusetts communities will help control Lyme.

It's well worth reading: Here it is.

May 9, 2011

Skeptical Inquirer editor on a remote feed at Skeptics meeting, tonight

Granite State Skeptics will have another of its "remote speaker" presentations tonight, featuring Ben Radford, deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine and author of a host of skeptic books, including "

"Media Mythmakers: How Journalists, Activists, and Advertisers Mislead Us" and "Lake Monster Mysteries: Investigating the World's Most Elusive Creatures" (with Joe Nickell), a scientific examination of lake monsters around the world.

It's at 7 p.m. tonight at Wings Your Way Manchester, a restaurant/bar at 1181 Elm St.

How do computer models work?

My column in The Telegraph today is, if I may (or must) say so myself, a noble failure: My reach exceeded my grasp, as they say. I wanted to show how computer models work, so I talked to a guy who developed an economic model being distributed by FairPoint. But due to lack of space (in the column) and time (to research and write), and to the fact that I never really got an "aha!" feeling, I wasn't able to throw much light on the question. I even fell back on a lame "laymen can't really judge computer models and have to trust the experts" argument.

Ah, well. You can't win âem all.

You can read it here, if you have nothing better to do.

Being photographed in public should be legal, but it is creepy

I strongly believe that we Americans have the right to take pictures in public places - a right increasingly limited by nervous-nellie law enforcement and business-protecting legislators.

Looking at things in public is part of our right to exist freely in a functioning democracy, and that right includes the right to record what we see or hear. The Powers That Be shouldn't try to keep that right to themselves.

That's my belief, but I'll admit that it can be creepy to have a stranger take your picture for no obvious reason.

Case in point: On my commute this morning, I was sitting in line at a traffic light (with my hybrid's motor off, slightly reducing my eco-guilt) when I noticed that the guy behind me was using his cell phone to take a picture of the back of my car. I have no idea who he is, and when the light changed he drove off without a glance in my direction.

What was that all about? I have no idea.

The car I'm driving was my wife's before we swapped. She put a political bumper sticker on the back, next to a pro-hybrid sticker that says "My other car is out of gas". Perhaps their proximity stuck PhoneCamera Man as significant in some way, and the picture will show up on a blog/Facebook page to illustrate some politial commentary. Or maybe he thought the hybrid sticker was funny. Or maybe he is running my license plate number through a web-search algorithm so that he can find my address and egg my house because he disagrees with the political sticker. Or maybe he was just seeing how well his new phone took pictures through the windshield. Or maybe he was doing some weird phone-holding calisthenics and I'm being paranoid.

Whatever the reason, the whole thing annoyed me. How dare this guy take my picture without my permission! If I was a cop I probably would have pulled him over, before remembering that this is his right as a person in America.

All in all, it was a sobering reminder that tighly held principles often feel different when you encounter them in the real world.

Falcon from Acadia killed in Boston

This from my brother who works at Acadia National Park in Maine.

This female Peregrine had a totol of 38 chicks during her 17 years.Peregrine Falcon - adult female

Bands - 987-63743, and 1/H black over red

The attached photo was taken on the sidewalk at 140 Providence Street indowntown Boston, Suffolk Co., MA on 05-04-11. When found, the carcass wasvery desiccated, so she had been dead for weeks or longer and probablyblown off of a building ledge or a roof. Both bands were crushed andabraded suggesting that the legs had been run over, but probably bysomething like a bike rather than a vehicle. The body seems to be intact and not crushed. She may well have died or been killed by another
Peregrine in February or March.

This Peregrine was originally banded on The Precipice in Acadia NationalPark on Mt. Desert Island, ME in 1994, so she was 17 years old. Our recordis a 19 year old male that nested on the Customs House in Boston.

She was the founding female of the Christian Science Church AdministrativeBuilding nesting pair in Boston. This pair was the third nesting pair inMassachusetts after recovery began. The first two were on the CustomsHouse, Boston (1987)and the Monarch Place Building in Springfield (1989).

From 1996 through 2010 she produced 38 young that were banded. Several ofthese died in accidents near the nest site, and eight others turned up inRoxbury, MA; Rochester, MA; Weymouth, MA; Plum Island, Newbury, MA; GreenAirport, Providence, RI; Kinderhook, NY; Kennedy Airport, NY: and one female was found nesting on the Mid-Hudson Bridge, NY in 2003.

Tom

Thomas W. French, Ph.D.
Assistant Director
Division of Fisheries and Wildlife
One Rabbit Hill Road
Westborough, MA 01581

May 10, 2011

Slow-draining Lake Champlain is a slow-motion flood

Here's the explanation by Matt Sukoski of the Burlington Free-Press about why Lake Champlain, which hit record-high levels last weekend, will remain in flood stage for weeks:

Think of Lake Champlain as a bucket with a single hole at the bottom of it. That hole is the Richelieu River, the lake's only outlet. Virtually all of Lake Champlain's water flows into the river, which runs north toward Montreal. Picture the bucket that represents Lake Champlain partly filled with water from a shower head. Each spray from the shower head can be thought of as one of the many rivers and streams feeding into the lake. The system works fine as long as the shower isn't turned on full blast.

A record rainfall April on top of melting heavy snowfall turned the shower on full blast, and northwestern Vermont is still struggling with the result.

The whole, soggy article can be read here.

A couple more 'solar on a stick' panels in Nashua

Two more solar panels have been installed on utility poles in Nashua as part of a PSNH study of the usefulness of the alternative-energy approach sometimes called "solar on a stick." PSNH set up four 200-watt panels on south Daniel Webster Highway poles in November, and earlier this month workers put up two larger panels, made by a different company, on West Hollis Street. It's all part of an experiment to see whether this system can be easily integrated into the grid.

You can read my story, with a nifty photo of a bucket truck in mid-installation, right here.

A great video about spring skiing at Tuckerman Ravine

It's spring skiing season at Tuckerman Ravine, which is one of those events that make New Hampshire special. I've been to the bowl twice although I didn't ski it, since the only part I can handle are the flat bits at the bottom, which didn't seem worth the effort of hauling up skis. Just visiting it and seeing the whole Spring-Break-Meets-Backcountry-Ski vibe is worth it, though.

If you haven't been, check the fine video by a N.Y. video guy named Zach Ornitz: See it here.

Maine âmicro-quake swarm' was just the coast rebounding from the Ice Age

Wired has a nice, short write-up on the cause of the "swarm of micro-quakes" that were felt in Maine earlier this month: It's just the land continuing to rebound from the Ice Age. The glaciers pushed it down so much that it has taken 12,000 years to return.

By the time the Laurentide sheet melted 14,000 years ago, the crust was so depressed that coastal Maine sea levels â the measure of how far sea reaches up on land â were 230 feet higher than today. The crust rebounded so violently that within 3,000 years, sea levels were some 200 feet lower than today's.

This is the sort of thing that complicates measurements about sea-level rise, by the way.

Electronic Pickpocketing

http://www.wreg.com/wreg-electronic-pickpocketing-story,0,6289527.story

It doesn't take much of an investment for the dark side of society to steal information from our credit cards. Just something else to worry about. I've heard about solutions to this that are as simple as a metal shield enclosing the cards.

Earle

May 11, 2011

Trying to recycle those annoying plastic bottle caps

An organization called Gimme 5 is trying to develop a system to recycle plastic caps of plastic bottles, which generally can't be handled by standard single-stream waste facilities. (The name comes from No. 5 plastic, the type used to make caps because it holds threads better than the No.1 or No. 2 plastic used for most bottles.) They've set up separate bins in Whole Foods markets in a number of states - but not New Hampshire, so far as I can tell from their website, even though they're partly underwritten by NH-based Stonyfield Farms. (Weirdly, they're not in Vermont, either; you'd think they'd do well in the Land of the Eco-heads.)

I learned of them from this Burlington Free-Press story.

Here's a decent overview of the different types of plastic, from MedicineNet.

It's not the mama black bears we need to worry about

Black bears are all over the place in NH - especially this time of year, when they're hungry after winter and love to rain bird feeders. So it's interesting that a new study found that, contrary to common belief, it's not mother bears protecting their cubs who are most likely to harm people; it's male bears foraging for food.

In other words, listen to NH Fish and Game and put away those bird feeders until later this summer!

Here's an NY Times story about the topic.

May 12, 2011

State watering down our cap-and-trade program

Saying that they don't want the government to interfere with the free market, N.H. senators have watered down the state's participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the nation's only carbon cap-and-trade program. The House wanted to eliminate it entirely, so this is less of a loss for the program than it could have been. Monitor story here.

May 13, 2011

Music in "the cloud" - an old idea that's new again

The Globe's Hiawatha Bray writes about proposals by Google and Amazon to let people store copies of their digital music online, so they can listen to it from any device. What I like, however, is this tidbit:

There's a lot to like about both these services. I'd have liked them just as much in 1997, when Michael Robertson pioneered the idea of a service to stream your own music. But the music companies hated the idea and sued MP3.com into a coma.

I'd forgotten all about MP3.com, back when the term "MP3â³ was still cutting-edge and cool, at least to my age group. Had to believe that was 14 years ago ...

Here's his piece.

1 in 8 people who ever lived are alive today

A little calculus and some historical estimates of world population and life expectancy led the site 1000memories to estimate that 56 billion human beings have lived since we evolved from ape-like creatures 200,000 years ago. Since there are 7 billion of us alive today, that means the current population is 12.5% of the total historical population of the species.

Check out the number-crunching here. (Spotted via Treehugger)

The best large-scale news to happen in my lifetime has been the astonishing decline in humanity's birth rate, which has done much to defuse "population bomb" fears. But the total population continues to soar because there are so many of us having babies, even though we're having fewer babies each - the UN now estimates it will peak at 10.1 billion, which means adding a couple more Chinas to the world.

May 15, 2011

10 "unsolved mysteries" that science easily explains

Cracked magazine was started as a low-rent competitor to Mad, and I'm not even sure it still has a print edition - but it has a surprisingly clever Web site. I heartily recommend you check out this post (which has a few not-safe-for-work words and a bit of snark, but by Net standards it's practically suitable for submission to an academic journal):

10 Famous Unsolved Mysteries Easily Explained by Science

It covers not just oldies-but-goodlies like ghosts and the Nazca Lines, but also cattle mutilation and Klerksdorp Spheres (winners of the fiercely competitive "least sexy name in geology" award).

May 16, 2011

This is an allergy season to remember - which means, to forget

Pretty much every year we see news stories about how this is a particularly bad pollen season - for example, this WMUR report from the weekend, which says both tree and grass pollen are arriving at the same time - but at least as far as I'm concerned, this year truly is a hum-dinger. I'm sneezing with runny eyes and runny nose, going through my weight in kleenex every couple of hours.

It got so bad yesterday that I stuck my head inside the freezer compartment of the refrigerator - the pollen-free cold was a blessing!

The weird thing is that it rained like crazy yesterday - 1.64 inches in my CoCoRaHS gauge - which usually clears out the air. Didn't work, though.

Mother Nature sure can be a pain in the neck.

Ticks and Lyme disease

Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne disease in Maine and the second most common of the reportable infectious diseases in Maine. May is Lyme Disease Awareness Month in Maine so remember to do your tick checks.

Lyme disease is a bacterial infection that is carried by Ixodesscapularis (the deer tick). Cases have increased over the last five years in Maine, and occur in all 16 counties. Lyme disease is most common among school age children and middle age adults. As the weather continues to get warmer, more ticks will be out in the open, and most infections in Maine occur during the summer months.

The most common early symptom of Lyme disease is an expanding red rash that occurs at the site of the tick bite within 3-32 days after being bitten. Fever, join and muscle pains may also occur. Lyme disease is treatable, and the majority of patients recover after receiving appropriate therapy.

Lyme disease is preventable. Maine CDC recommends following the "No Ticks 4 ME" approach which includes:

1. Wear protective clothing

2. Use insect repellent

3. Perform daily tick checks

4. Use caution in tick habitats

Ticks must be attached for 24-48 hours before the bacteria can be transmitted, so prompt removal of ticks is extremely important. Anyone with a known tick bite, or who has been in a tick habitat should watch for symptoms for at least 30 days after the exposure. If symptoms develop, call your physician.

Maine CDC has numerous educational materials available on our website at http://www.maine.gov/dhhs/boh/ddc/epi/vector-borne/lyme/index.shtml

Free, fact-filled Science Cafe New Hampshire coming to Concord

Would you like to talk about complicated subjects with people who understand the details, instead of just listening to advocates who rant and rave about their pre-conceived notions, or being subjected to somebody as lame as (shudder) a journalist?

Sure you would! That's why you're going to attend the inaugural Science Cafe New Hampshire, next Tuesday (May 24) at 7 p.m. at The Barley House, 132 N. Main St., in Concord. It will feature the state climatologist, a city planner, and a UNH professor with a statistics expertise, who will discuss "Climate Change in NH."

I will moderate, but that's no reason to stay away - I promise to keep my mouth mostly shut, letting the knowledgeable folks speak while whoever shows up asks questions. It's informal and loose; the only rule is NO POLITICS!

The plan is for monthly cafes; the June talk is titled "The Future of Food."

Here's my column about it today. Here's the Science Cafe New Hampshire website.

I think this could be really good, but it depends on people attending with intelligent questions and open minds. That means you, Granite Geek reader!

May 17, 2011

Nerd vs. Geek ... there's a big difference

Kudos to Nashua High School North for honoring academic excellence ... but why did they have to call the event Nerdapalooza? Don't they know it should be Geekapalooza? They're a reason that you're not reading New Hampshire Nerd, after all.

Geeks are knowledgeable and obsessed - a good definition of a geek is "somebody more interested in the workings of a topic than society thinks you should be."

Geeks don't have to be technical. You can be an art geek if you study the composition of paint or the mechanics of brushstrokes; a harmonica geek if you collect the instruments and learn the history, whether or not you play one; and, of course, a computer geek if you understand how the machines work beyond ctl-alt-del and want to learn more.

You cannot, however, be a wealth geek, because society thinks any possible amount of detailed interest in wealth is perfectly reasonable and even admirable.

"Nerd," on the other hand, carries connotations of dorkiness, social ineptitude, more than obsession. Consider this Venn Diagram, which explains the difference.

Hopefully the school will see the error of its ways and rename the event, which takes place from 5 pm to 7 pm, Saturday, May 21, 2011 at the NHS North medium gymnasium.

The Science Honor Society will have booths featuring their research, there will be a barbeque and the New Hampshire Amateur Astronomers (star geeks, not star nerds) hosting a Star Party starting at 8:30 pm on the athletic fields at North. All events are free and open to all Nashua School District students, their families, and the general public. (Unless it rains, which it probably will)

No federal decision on blocking cave access, despite white-nose syndrome fears

On Tuesday the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service announced a national plan to combat white-nose syndrome, the fungus-related disease that is devastating bat populations in the Eastern U.S. (See the plan, in PDF form, here.)

I just spent a few minutes flipping through it. It has lots of good background information and suggestions about organizing approaches and directing research, but the "action plan" section avoids the most contentious issue: Whether to close access to all caves on federal land, to protect isolated populations, until we know more about the disease.

Some environmental groups like Bat Conservation International think such a sweeping action is necessary if we're going to prevent complete extinction of at least two bat species in North America. Other groups, notably cavers, think it would be going overboard (as I noted in a column last year) because we don't know whether the disease is actually being spread by the bats themselves, traveling here and there, rather than via contaminated boots or caving equipment.

The report says FWS must "manage cave access to minimize risk" and "investigate bat-to-bat transmission" but makes no immediate recommendations for action about caves.

Meanwhile, as this FWS page shows, the disease continues to spread and wipe out bat populations. It was spotted in 2006 in New York state, and is now found throughout New England and from western Kentucky to Ontario to Nova Scotia. I haven't had any bats around my barn for years; we once had a dozen or more catching bugs every dusk, all summer long.

May 18, 2011

A bear (I think) nailed our beehive and bird feeder

Late Monday night we were visited by what appears to have been a bear. It ripped the bird feeder off our porch*, bending the supporting metal rod and tore up some of last year's beehive frames that were stacked in the barn, crunching on the wax and dried bits of honey, breaking a few in the process.

It didn't touch the beehive itself, perhaps because the new hive hasn't had time to make much honey yet. So we rushed to set up the electric fence around it - although there's so much tall, wet grass that I'm afraid the shock will drain away; not sure how much of a disincentive it will be.

I'm surprised a bear could come up against the house without waking us, one floor above. I'm also surprised that there aren't any other signs of its presence on the fairly crowded porch - no scratches in the railing that it must have climbed on or leaned against, for example.

*I know, I know - the state says we shouldn't leave birdfeeders out right now for that very reason. I've even written articles about it for the Telegraph, but do I listen to myself? No!

Maine: Sure, keep your old analog power meter, but it'll cost you

The electric utility Central Maine Power Co. has intriguing plans to install two-way meters in customers' homes as a first step toward creating a "smart grid," which shows promise toward increasing efficiency and reducing energy use. But it has stumbled over a few people's silly fear that the wireless transmitters will somehow do medical damage. Never mind the zillion other wireless transmission pulsing through our bodies every second of the day; the wireless meters are different because ... well, because they're new, I guess. New is scary.

MPC says skipping some homes would undermine the whole point of a smart grid. Now the state Public Utilitiy Commission says they have to skip homes if customers demand it - but they can charge those customers an extra $20 installation fee and $1.50 a month, as compensation for the hassle. It's unclear whether this will jump-start the whole project. Read the Press-Herald story here.

There is, by the way, a major worry with time-of-day pricing and other aspects of the smart grid, but it has nothing to do with unfounded fears. Such a change will upend long-established pricing patterns, and I worry that somehow the big industry folks will figure out how to shift more cost to us schlubs who get the bill.

May 19, 2011

Ranked-choice voting coming to Portland for mayor race

Portland, Maine, is going to elect a mayor this year using ranked-choice voting, in which you list your preference for everybody on the ballot instead of just choosing one. It's the latest example of experiments in alternative voting methods that crop up now and then.

Burlington, Vermont, used a similar system for a few elections until voters tossed it out, as I've noted before; while a New Hampshire legislator wanted this state to consider adopting it here - an idea that has been shelved in committee and seems unlikely to go anywhere.

As explained by the Press-Herald, the election in Maine will work like this:

Voters will mark their ballots not only for the candidate they'd like to see win, but also rank the rest in order of preference. If no candidate gets a majority of first-place votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is dropped and the second choices of those voters are added to the first-choice totals for all other candidates. It's possible that the new totals would require a change in the order of finish.

If no one has a majority after one candidate is dropped, the new last-place candidate is dropped and his or her second-choice votes are added to the first-choice totals. If any voter's second choice is a candidate who's already been eliminated, the voter's third choice gets the vote, and so on.

The process continues until one candidate gets more than 50 percent. Voters need not rank all the candidates, but that would reduce their say if the runoff process continues for more than a round or two.

Portland's mayor hasn't been directly elected for years, and a number of candidates are in the running. Ranked-choice voting makes more sense when there are a lot of roughly equivalent candidates.

How do you test a 90-meter windmill blade? Very carefully

A huge testing facility for wind turbines, with the ability to test blades up to 90 meters long, is being built in Charlestown, Mass., just across the Charles River from Boston. Built partly with $24 million in stimulus funds, it the first facility in the U.S. that can test to truly large wind turbine blades. (Since wind power effectiveness is largely driven by the "swept area" of the turbine blades, bigger is better - so testing big blades is important.)

From a Mass High Tech story: The center will provide the ability to test three blades simultaneously, along with 100 tons of overhead bridge crane capacity and a "full suite" of certification tests for turbine blades, according to the announcement. Tests will include static and fatigue testing, blade material testing, dual axis static or fatigue testing and quality testing.

May 20, 2011

E-books outselling printed books at Amazon

Amazon says it is now selling more e-books than hardcover and paperback printed books, combined, by roughly 5 % - and that doesn't include free e-books. Here's the AP item.

Amazon wants to sell e-books because of the profits from Kindle, just as Apple used iTunes to boost sales of the iPod, and so it has an incentive to triumph electronic sales. I don't know who double-checks their data - SEC, maybe? Still, it does seem like we're passing through some sort of transition point in publishing.

How to put out a fire: Spray it with liquid manure

The Union-Leader has a great story about a New Hampshire farmer who extinguished the fire in a burning truck, one that was too far from the road for a fire pumper to get to, by spraying it with 15,000 gallons of liquified cow manure from his storage area.

Check out the story here - or you can watch a video here, on Firehouse.com.

Boy that fire must have stunk when it was out. Thank goodness the Web doesn't have scratch-and-sniff functionality ...

May 22, 2011

Environment and jobs vs. environment and jobs - ship-launching version

There's an interesting debate around the Bath Iron Works, as reported in the Portland Press-Herald (read it here): When to dredge the Kennebec River. Apparently the river needs to be dredged in order for large ships to be launched, including a $1 billion destroyer nearing completion. Usually the dredging is done in the fall, after shellfish season and tourist season are over, but the Navy wants to do it in August so it can launch the destroyer sooner.

The result is a complicated fight: jobs from the Bath Iron Works vs. jobs in fishing/tourism, with the environmental community wanting the dredging to be delayed so it does less damage to the river/bay bottom (a contention that not everybody agrees with).

The dispute is also a reminder of how much humans alter the landscape, as a matter of course.

Don't move firewood ... dot-org, of course

I have a story in the Sunday Telegraph about a push to make it illegal to bring firewood into New Hampshire from out of state (it's already illegal to bring out-of-state wood onto state lands) in an attempt to slow the spread of invasive bugs. Here's the story.

For me, the most interesting part was hearing of research which found that 40 percent of the people who come into NH to camp bring their own firewood, presumably to avoid paying $5 to $10 for the stuff near campsites. Further, researchers sampled some firewood and found 600 different insect species living in 19 samples. Apparently, people haulting sticks in their trunks or the back of their RV is a major vector for insect movement in this country.

By coincidence, yesterday my wife and I were to New York state, which has had a similar law for three years, to pick up our son from college and I saw billboards for a public-information program on this very topic - called DontMoveFirewood.org.

May 23, 2011

Argument over items left in rental housing may have led to Gene Mallove's murder

Filed under General by david brooks at 6:04 am

It has been seven years since Eugene Mallove - New Hampshire's cold fusion advocate and creator of "Infinite Energy" magazine - was killed at his childhood home in Connecticut, and his death remains something of a mystery. Over the weekend, police in Nortwich, Conn., arrested a third suspect, adding to the two people arrested a couple of months back. The local paper says "courtroom testimony" indicates that Mallove was beaten to death in a fight after the people, former tenants of the house, "learned Mallove was throwing away (a former tenant's) parents' belongings after their eviction." Allegedly they beat him to "near death ... then returned with her to the scene of the beating in order to make it look like a robbery."

Read the story here.

Infinite Energy magazine continues going strong, advocating varous fringe chemistry/physics theories.

May 24, 2011

Want to make more money? Get a science/tech college degree

I assume that people who read a column called Granite Geek are more likely to have college degrees in the sciences than in the humanities, so we'll all get some self-satisfaction from this story:

Over a lifetime, the earnings of workers who have majored in engineering, computer science or business are as much as 50 percent higher than the earnings of those who major in the humanities, the arts, education and psychology, according to an analysis by researchers at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.

"I don't want to slight Shakespeare," said Anthony Carnevale, one of the report's authors. "But this study slights Shakespeare."

You can read it here in the Washington Post.

There's no guarantee, of course. My bachelor's degree is in mathematics (no advanced degree, for better or worse). For my entire career I have generally been the only person in the newsroom with a science degree - yet I have not generally been the best-paid person in the newsroom.

Using a power plant's waste heat as heat is harder than it sounds

A 50-megawatt wood-burning electrical power plant has operated in the heart of Burlington, Vermont, for decades. One of the mantras in biomass power these days is "combined heat and power" - not just generating electricity but using the waste heat as, well, heat in nearby buildings - so the eco-conscious folks in Vermont are pondering whether to do the same with their McNeil Generating Plant.

It seems a no-brainer, but it's more complicated than you might think. (Isn't everything?) There are technical questions, such as whether it is better to transfer the heat via steam or hot water, and, perhaps more importantly, financial and city-planning questions.

Here's a long and detailed analysis from the Burlington Free-Press - an interesting look about the devil-in-the-details which make all the difference for something like this.

Come to Concord tonight (7 p.m.) for the first Science Cafe NH

Forget about attending the kids' softball game, zoning board meeting, or choir practice - tonight you need to be at The Barley House restaurant in Concord at 7 p.m. for the first Science Cafe New Hampshire, featuring a discussion about the science and technology of coping with climate change in New Hampshire - with the state climatologist, Keene city planner and a UNH professor.

It is a FREE, informal discussion, not a lecture; you can buy dinner and/or drinks, and talk and learn. It's like a pub party with uber-geeks. More information here.

Be there or be ... well, less knowledgeable.

May 25, 2011

The first Science Cafe was a blast - next one June 21

Almost 50 people (plus some family and friends) filled the basement lounge of the Barley House restaurant/tavern last night for the first free Science Cafe New Hampshire, which discussed climate change. The next one is June 21, on the Future of Food - be there!

New Hampshire Public Radio and the Concord Monitor's weekly paper will have coverage of last night's event. I was moderating so I couldn't take notes, but here are a few highlights from my memory banks:

** State climatologist Mary Stampone says that she doesn't think the biggest devastation that's coming due to climate is an an increase in big storms - hurricanes, tornadoes - but the increased likelihood of drought. If the U.S. Southwest goes into a dustbowl scenario, watch out.

** Keene City Planner Rhett Lamb gave an interesting example of planning for life in a climate-changed world: Culverts. These big metal tubes allow streams and brooks to flow under roadways, and their dimensions are based on historical rainfall/runoff data. If those numbers increase sharply, as climate models indicate they will, flooded roads will become the norm. So as part of routine upgrades and maintenance, the city is putting in bigger culverts - which costs more money with no immediate, obvious return. Not an easy move for a city council to make.

** UNH Sociologist Larry Hamilton got into climate change work out of sociological research decades ago in the Arctic, where the climate is already changing. Talking to people having to make adjustments led him into work figuring out why the changes were happening. He calls himself a "cheerful pessimist" on the topic: He thinks the planet is in big, big trouble, but that perhaps we'll figure a way out of complete disaster.

FairPoint uses draft horses to lay fiber optic

VTdigger.org, an online journalism site for Vermont, has a profile of a 1,700-pound drafthorse used to lay fiber-optic cable for FairPoint in northeast Vermont. Here's the whole story, and here's a taste of it:

As a so-called "telephone horse," Fred starts the morning by towing 48-fiber cable (so called because of the 48 individual strands of glass cables wound into an inch-thick band) from a massive spool on the rear of a FairPoint truck. Then he backtracks with the crew, drawing the overhead lasher along utility wires between poles. They pause frequently to jump poles and troubleshoot snags.

Fred is 14, and he's been laying line for five years. Desmarais, who lives in Westmore, has laid line with draft horses for 31 years, and he learned to drive a team on his father's farm in Barton when he was young. He travels to Amish country in the Midwest at least once a year to appraise new equipment and buy a horse, if one catches his eyeâas Fred did one year while Desmarais was in Indiana. Desmarais has four draft horses, another Belgian and two Percherons: a second team lays line for FairPoint elsewhere in the state.

I spotted this via Slashdot, of all place - which drew some excellent reader comments, including this one:

A horse is a self-replicating semi-autonomous rover optimized for negotiating tough terrain, and it was developed without DARPA assistance. It is powered by biofuels that can be produced using COTS technologies, but which for which no DOE research is required. Its waste stream is biodegradeable, and in the quantities generated by a single horse, facilities for the storage and processing of the waste pending biodegradation do not require EPA approval.

Report warns about spent fuel in cooling pools at nuclear power plants, including Vermont Yankee and Seabrook

The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant has more used radioactive fuel stored in pools at the plant than is stored at all four of the Japanese damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors, says a new report that raises concern about the long-term safety of such storage.

Seabrook Station has about two-thirds as much fuel stored in its pools, according to the report. You can read it here.

Written by the nonprofit Institute for Policy Studies, the report urges that used fuel to transferred to "dry casket" storage, either at each power plant or at central repositories, to limit the risk of a release of radioactive material resulting from an earthquake, storm, terrorism or building fire.

"Even though they contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet, U.S. spent nuclear fuel pools are mostly contained in ordinary industrial structures designed to merely protect them against the elements," says the report, titled "Spent Nuclear Fuel Pools in the U.S.: Reducing the Deadly Risks of Storage."

"Safely securing the spent fuel by eliminating highly radioactive, crowded pools should be a public safety priority of the highest degree."

The report estimates that America's 104 plants have produced 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel, 75 percent of which is stored in pools at the power plants themselves.

Seabrook has 425 tons of material on site, with a total radioactivity of 81 million curies, while Vermont Yankee has 609 tons, with a total radioactivity of 100 million curies.

These amounts are dwarfed by the fuel stored at many other plants, which have two to four times as much spent fuel, according to the report's estimates. Direct comparison can be difficult, however, because of varied makeup of radioactive elements in spent fuel.

At one time the national plan was to move such fuel into dry storage casks inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but that plan was scuttled by the Obama administration after years of dispute and controversy.

Removing Rust through Technology

David asked me to write more about what I'm doing. So, here's the latest project.

I was just given an Edelstaal miniature lathe that had been stored in less than ideal conditions. It's mostly aluminum, but the ways and accessory parts are steel that had some rust on them. The 4 jaw and 3 jaw chuck especially were quite badly rusted. Instead of attacking the rust with sandpaper and steel wool, I'm using an electrolytic method that actually converts the rust back to iron. It's a lot better than naval jelly, coke or muriatic acid. Voltages and currents are low enough that there is almost no hazard from fumes or fire.

The container is a cat litter bucket with a couple of gallons of water and washing soda to make the water conductive. The electrode surrounding the to be cleaned part is made of iron or steel. I surround the part with a rolled up bandsaw blade that was due to be tossed out anyway.

The power supply can be a cheap battery charger capable of a couple of amp output. 12 volts is about right, it's not a critical element in the process. The positive side of the power supply is connected to the bandsaw blade and the negative side connected to the rusted part. After a few hours, 2 to 8 hours depending on the amount of rust, the part is removed, flushed off and polished with steel wool. It's remarkable how effective this is. I have a few other tools hanging around that were too good to be thrown out quite yet that will be going into the tank soon.

If anyone wants a more thorough description of the process, here are a couple of links to some more good information.

http://www.stovebolt.com/techtips/rust/electrolytic_derusting.htm

http://antique-engines.com/electrol.asp

Earle Rich Mont Vernon

May 26, 2011

White nose syndrome shows up in Maine bats

I hadn't realized that white-nose syndrome had not been found in Maine until, alas, that statement was no longer true. It has been found in two of the state's three known bat hibernation sites, reports AP.

The story is nothing new but still depressing:

"As it continues to spread we don't see anything slowing the spread of the fungus down," Ann Froschauer of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said during a conference call with reporters. "We're down into North Carolina and Tennessee and into the Midwest in Kentucky and Indiana and Ohio, and we don't seem to see any slowing down of the fungus being spread among bats in those areas."

Biologist is counting how many bugs are killed by cars (yes, bugs)

This isn't local, but it's too interesting to ignore: A biologist in the Netherlands is trying to quantify the toll taken on bugs by automobiles.He's not worried about extinction, though - he just wants to use the data as a way to estimate insect demographics

From the article in Treehugger:

The biologist from the University of Wageningen believes that around 500 billion insects are killed each year in vehicle strikes in the Netherlands alone, but within those little deaths lie clues about how bugs are distributed, information that has been thus far elusive. By enlisting the help of drivers Dutch drivers, van Vliet hopes to determine when and where insect populations are most dense, and how climate conditions may impact those figures.

This is automotive citizen science, I guess.

May 27, 2011

GOP presidential hopefuls have to reject global warming to be viable

Tuesday's Science Cafe discussion about climate change avoided the deadly taint of political discussion, which I also try to avoid here in Granite Geek, but just in case you thought that weather extremes were moderating anti-global warming extremes, and AP story reminds us that Republican presidential hopefuls must be climate change deniers to make it through the party primary:

Republican presidential hopefuls can believe in man-made global warming as long as they never talk about it, and oppose all the so-called solutions," said Marc Morano, a former aide to Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, one of the most vocal climate skeptics in Congress

Read it here. And I promise, no more politics.

Help the state keep track of all those wild turkeys

The state wants your help keeping track of all those wild turkeys - the birds, not the beverage - that are spreading throughout southern New Hampshire. They have established an online form for you to report those funny-looking flocks as they wander through your front yard. It kicks in June 1: Telegraph story is here.

Wild turkeys might be our best wildlife restoration story of recent years. The species had been wiped out of the state ("extirpated" is, I believe, the term) by hunting until a small population was brought from New York state to the Keene area, in the late 1970s. Since then they've multiplied and their range has extended so far that there is both a spring and fall turkey hunting season now, and it's no longer unusual to see a flock crossing even a busy urban road.

It used to be that seeing a wild turkey was like seeing a bobcat - you'd stop the car and scream in excitement. Now it's like seeing a deer - nice, worth slowind down slightly, but nothing major. At this rate, in 10 years it'll be like seeing Canada geense - you'll share your fist at the darn things as a nuisance rather than a pleasure.

May 28, 2011

Thursday, celebrate 20 years of UNH Space Grant

Next Thursday, June 2, is New Hampshire Space Grant Day, in which members of the New Hampshire Space Grant Consortium (NHSGC) and officials from the University of New Hampshire and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - including former astronaut Jeff Hoffman - will celebrate the consortium's 20 years of work dedicated to improving education and public awareness of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, particularly as related to the space program.

The celebration will occur at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) in Morse Hall on the Durham campus from noon to 3 p.m. Members of the general public are invited to participate.

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/topics/shuttlerollout

May 29, 2011

EPA considers tighter pollution controls on most home wood-burning heat

Tux Turkel at the Portland Press-Herald has a good, detailed piece on EPA proposals to tighten pollution controls, particularly limits of fine-particle emissions, for most wood-burning heat sources used by homes, from pellet stoves to those obnoxious outdoor boilers (which, I learned from the article, are officially called "hydronic heaters").

Indoor fireplaces aren't covered, under the theory that they're ornamental more than heat-related - and, critically, existing units aren't covered either, even though they can pollute like nobody's business. He mentions last year's program in Keene that used used $106,000 in federal money to buy 86 old wood stoves and given vouchers to help replace them.

He says they represent the first substantial changes since the EPA set performance standards to "certify" wood stoves, 23 years ago, and that the compliance date for wood stoves and outdoor boilers is likely to be June 2014. Other standards will kick in by 2017.

May 30, 2011

Space fan watches the end of the shuttle era, and you can watch too

Nashuan Aaron Cunningham, a real space geek, is going down to Cape Canaveral to watch the final rollout of a space shuttle, and he's going to post items about it at a special Telegraph page, here:

This uses a program called CoverItLive that the Telegraph has tried a few times, most notably for covering trials - it is a sort of Web-embedded mix of twitter, Tumblr and a blog. You have to sit through an ad when it first comes on.

Here's my column from Sunday (no newspaper is printed today, Memorial Day) about the project:

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/921028-196/space-fan-watches-as-the-shuttle-era.html

May 31, 2011

Follow the shuttle landing live ... at 2 a.m.

Aaron Cunningham, the Nashua space fan who is following the very land shuttle rollout, of Atlantis, for the Telegraph, plans to also cover the last landing of the shuttle Endeavor tonight, via his special page here: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/topics/shuttlerollout

The landing is slated for 2 a.m. - if you're up and in front of the computer you can check in.

UNH data-driven modeling keeps track of carbon sources and sinks

From the UNH News Office: Scientists Jingfeng Xiao and Scott Ollinger of the University of New Hampshire's Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) have received funding from the National Science Foundation to cover help quantify continental-scale carbon fluxes or so-called carbon "sources" and "sinks" in the long-term effort to craft more accurate climate change forecasts and facilitate climate policymaking.

The UNH research is based on a unique modeling method pioneered by Xiao, and will make use of very large sets of ecological data only recently available from study sites across North America.

Xiao is the project's principal investigator and a research assistant professor in the EOS Complex Systems Research Center (CSRC). The $517,000 award from NSF will fund the three-year project.

The grant is awarded under the first round of competitively awarded grants for the agency's new Macrosystems Biology program, designed to spur research on ecosystem processes and their complex interactions with climate, land use, and invasive species at regional to continental scales. If the continental-scale carbon budget can be "closed," scientists will be in a better position to make climate forecasts, particularly with respect to year-to-year variability in the carbon budget caused by large-scale disturbances like droughts or forest fires.

Xiao's successful proposal results in part from pioneering work he has conducted over the last four years. Specifically, he has developed and refined a modeling method whereby data gathered at individual ecological "flux tower" research sites across North America can be "upscaled" or extrapolated to provide a statistically accurate picture of carbon fluxes across the entire continent and encompassing different ecosystem and climate types.

"This approach is very different from traditional ecosystem models, which are built upon a lot of complex, underlying ecosystem processes," Xiao explains. "Our method is a data-driven approach, meaning it is an empirical, statistical model using vast amounts of data being gathered year-round on an hourly basis by the network of flux towers. This approach can lead to model parameters that are more representative of the full spectrum of vegetation and climate conditions, and to more robust estimates of ecosystem carbon fluxes over broad regions."

The network of more than 100 towers dotted around the North American continent measures the covariance (how much two variables change together) of vertical wind velocity and fluctuating carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration around the tower's one-square-kilometer footprint. From this data, the exchange of CO2 between the ecosystem and atmosphere can be accurately calculated. Xiao's modeling method essentially allows the numbers from the individual tower sites to be crunched together into the bigger picture.

The creation of NSF's Macrosystems Biology program follows the agency's ambitious National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), which when completed in 2016 will provide the first continental network of data-gathering stations. The 62 NEON sites will make some 270 measurements in their respective ecological systems.

Can moose be an invasive species in Canada???

The Economist, that fine weekly magazine with a boring name, has a cool item this week about the most unexpected invasive spcies I've ever heard of. Here's a snippet:

The moose may be a Canadian icon, but in the island of Newfoundland it is an alien, introduced a century ago when local leaders reckoned their presence would attract hunters and tourists to what was a struggling British colony. Unlike in the rest of Canada, the moose has no natural predators on the island, where the native wolf went extinct. There are now around 150,000 of the lumbering giants in Newfoundland. That has drawn hunters. But the habit of the moose to wander across highways in the dark has made it a road hazard responsible for around 700 collisions a year.

NH, by contrast, has about 250 collisions a year (says NH Fish and Game) - and we have more traffic. I guess our moose are more road-savvy.

The article is here: http://www.economist.com/node/18745371?story_id=18745371

June 2011

June 1, 2011

Is it safe (contacting-bacteria-from-teens-wise) to shake hands at graduation?

The Improbable Research blog is never afraid to ask the controversial question. Today it tackles the timely query: Is It Safe To Shake Hands At Graduation?

It looks at a study which was "designed to measure the degree to which principals and deans are potentially exposed to the risk of pathogen acquisition as part of their occupational duties to shake hands" with teenagers.

You can read the Improbable Research blog here, with links to the study and to Marc Abrahams' full column in the UK paper The Guardian.

603 area code won't have to share N.H. (and it's not because of the Net)

I have a story in the Telegraph today about why 603 is going to remain the only telephone area code in New Hampshire for at least four and probably 10 or more years to come - and it's not because of VoIP or Google Voice or Skype or anything like that. It's because numbers used to be handed out willy-nilly (here, have 10,000 numbers, whether you use them or not) and now they aren't.

A lamp that lights up when the space station flies overhead.

Here's the PUC "docket" on the whole issue, if you want more details.

June 2, 2011

Mass. flywheel energy company is ready to hit the big time

Beacon Power of Tyngsborough, Mass., is preparing to unveil its 20-MW energy storage plant in Stephentown, N.Y. The plant uses 200 flywheels spinning in vacuum chambers to deliver bursts of power as needed to compensate for wind/solar variation, and more importantly to provide frequency regulation, which helps to stabilize the electric grid by balancing power supply levels. They have another plant in the works in Pennsylvania.

The wheels (carbon-fiber composite rim supported by a metal hub) spin at between 8,000 and 16,000 rpm - at the latter, the flywheel can store and deliver 25 kWh of extractable energy very quickly. At 16,000 rpm, the company says, the surface speed of the rim is approximately Mach 2 or about 1500 mph. Here's their technical description.

I'm talking to them today for a Sunday business story for the Telegraph. Sometimes my job is fun!

Rock Snot loves pristine streams - the cleaner the better

One of the mysteries of the slimy creek-polluting algae known as "rock snot", more officially called didymo, is how they survive in very pristine streams. Clear brooks and rivers are clear because they don't contain much in the way of the nutrients that algae needs to grow, particularly phosphorus. So, how does didymo survive in clean places like the upper reaches of the Connecticut River?

By using special bacteria to "scrub" any phosphorus off the bottom of the creeks, condensing it with iron in a way that increases the biological availability of phosphorus, making the nutrient available to didymo even though they're inaccessible to most other living things. That's according to a new study of rock snot in South Dakota streams - you can read a summary from the Nastional Science Foundation here.

The hope is that this discovery will lead to new methods of containing or eradicating rock snot before it turns most of the nation's mountain streams into slippery, insect-deprived wastelands.

The main battle being fought against Rock Snot right now is theattempt to ban felt soles on fisherman wading boots. The soles are great at gripping wet rocks, but they're impossible to clean compared to rubber soles, so they can more easily spread contamination from stream to stream.

June 3, 2011

Argh! I paid money for some *homeopathic* baloney!

I can't entirely disagree with the argument that if people want to waste their money on useless pseudo-medicine, we should let them - the placebo effect is powerful, after all. But makers of hoo-hah need to be up front about their nonsense, otherwise they're just deluding us.

I say this because I have been deluded. I recently realized that I bought some homeopathic - i.e., useless - medicine.

It's made by Tecnu, a company with a good reputation for medication that prevents poison ivy infection, by applying it before contamination. This is slightly different stuff, called Medicated Poison Ivy Scrub, designed to help after you've touched the ^%$#@ plants. (Yes, I'm very sensititve) The bottle has lots of big words about "works in 15 seconds" and "relieves itching" and "removes poison oils" all over the bottle. But right at the bottom, in smaller type that even the net weight listing, I noticed last week that it says HOMEOPATHIC.

When I saw that I checked the ingredient list. I thought the active ingredient (Grindella robusta) was listed at 3%, a perfectly reasonable amount in medication â¦ but it's actually 3X, which is homeo-nonesense for diluted 10^4 (I think) times. I've paid money for a placebo!

What a ripoff. If I was a lawymaker I'd immediately submit a bill requiring that makes of homeopathic medicine include that term in writing at least as large as any other word on the label.

Now, I had used this medicine before I realized that it was nonesense, so the question is: did it work? The answer is: It seemed to help the itch, but it's a gritty paste and rubbing it on was a distraction, if nothing else. I did not notice that it shortened the days-long infection period, which is what I really wanted, but I'm not sure I ever applied it soon enough after getting infected to expect that the oils could be removed. So I can't judge its effectiveness one way or the other.

I can, however, say that a product in which the active ingredient exists in homeopathic amounts is a product that has no active ingredient at all. They shouldn't hide that fact.

June 6, 2011

Can there be fake homeopathic medicine (with real ingredients, but pretending not to?)

Is it possible to have fake homeopathic medicine - that is, medicine which pretends to be homeopathic but actually contains useful amounts of an ingredient? (Why would a drug company do that? Maybe because they know believers in homeopathy will shell out bucks for stuff that does nothing, so if their medicine is a dud, slapping "homeopathic" on the label gives them a new market - like adding "natural" or "as seen on TV".)

I ask this question because of a comment by reader John Rosenau on my previous post, in which I complained that I had bought homeopathic poison-ivy medicine from a company called Tecnu, without realizing it. Rosenau noted that the medicine has an active ingredient listed at 3X, which means diluted 10 x 10 x 10 times, and that an active ingredient concentration of one-tenth of a percent isn't all that unusual for real medicine. "Homeopaths tend to deal in concentrations of 60X, corresponding to 1:10^60â³ he wrote. "The problem here is that âhomepathic' is ill-defined."

That led to the mind-boggling idea of a "real" homepath complaining because Tecnu is only *pretending* to be homeopathic! I have this vision of a trial before the North American Society of Homeopaths in which upholders of the faith shout in outrage that Tecnu's medication actually performs some medical service, going against all the tenents of homepathy!

A lovely thought, that â¦

Making the Internet bigger, sort of: It's almost World IPv6 Day

My Telegraph column today is about the slow, continued slog to switch the Internet over the vastly bigger address space in IPv6. Wednesday is World IPv6 Day, when Facebook, Google and some other biggies switch on v6 versions of their sites as a sort of beta test. Expect confusion.

Read the column here.

And if you want a slightly more in-depth discussion, this Slashdot postclaims that IPv6-only hosting (as compared to parallel, dual-stack hosting) won't make sense for years.

June 7, 2011

A wind power side industry: Building temporary wooden roads

Changing America's power system should provide new jobs, or so everybody hopes, but they're not always the jobs we think of. The Portland Press-Herald has a good article about a side industry blooming because of a $1.4 billion upgrade of Central Maine Power's transmission system (an upgrade largely designed to handle Maine's growing wind-farm production).

That side industry is building temporary wooden roads so that heavy equipment can drive over mud and dirt, carrying heavy equipment. These "timber mats" have evolved over the years from loose logs to 16-foot-wide paths of hardwood logs bolted together. Maine timberlands have an advantage because out-of-state timber mats must have all their bark removed, to reduce the chance that they'll carry invasive weeds or bugs with them - that cost isn't necessary for in-state wood.

It's a good piece covering what will eventually be $100 million worth of temporary roads. Read the article here.

E. coli outbreaks occur because food is full of excrement

I have a story in the Telegraph today in which officials express concern and confusion about the E. coli outbreak inGermany (you can read it here), but to be frank, there's a much better story on Slate that gets right to the point: E. coli outbreaks occur in meat and on various produce because we fertilize food with excrement, and because it's hard to kill animals without some of the excrement in their intestines getting in the food.

The article doesn't call it excrement, though.

It also argues that we tip-toe around the issue, just as I'm tip-toeing around writing the word "shit", which makes it hard to have an intelligent discussion.

I strongly suggest you read the article here.

It's got a really excellent closing, too: "The current German O104 situation â¦ has grimly served to remind us of the frailty of life and the wonders of good plumbing. More than anything else, the science behind E. coli emphatically points out something far more horrifying than any one outbreak: Nature doesn't like us. It doesn't hate us, but it doesn't like us. Rather, it is perfectly and eternally disinterested."

June 8, 2011

Even the most secure of security tech firms can be hacked, as RSA shows

The Globe has a story about how hackers swiped information about a bunch of SecureID tokens, used to gain tempoerary access to secure computer networks, from RSA Security in Hopkinton, Mass. Since RSA Security was founded by the guys who invented the RSA public-key algorithm, it would seem to be as secure as they come. Nothing is secure, I guess.

Here's the Globe story, which says that the company has disclosed details of the hack.

Comcast and/or I aren't IPv6 ready (nor is the Telegraph), on World IPv6 Day

Either Comcast's DNS server or my home router/moden are not ready for IPv6, according to http://test-ipv6.com/ on World IPv6 Day. (This test indicates that Comcast nodes aren't IPv6 ready, as the blue bar shows.) The Telegraph's connection also puts out.

Check it out yourself here. This is the result I got at home:

Wired, by the way, calls this the Nerdiest Holiday Ever!

June 9, 2011

Invasive wasp battles invasive emerald ash borer, and hopefully won't cause more problems

History is full of examples of species being imported to solve an environmental problem and then causing more problems that were there originally. It happens so often that scientists are now trying to model when it's viable and when it isn't.

But biological control is so potent that it's still worth trying. Here's an example: Wisconsin researchers are testing waspsp from China in an attempt to limit the spread of emerald ash borer, which is perhaps the most destructive of all invasive insects threatening America's forests at the moment. (They're not in N.H. yet, but it has made it to New York State and probably will be here eventually.)

Check out the story here and cross your fingers that they're on to something.

A light that lights up whenever the space station flies overhead

If you're a Make magazine kind of person and a space fan, you'll love this:

Get to work.

June 10, 2011

Some diversity of opinion on climate change in GOP ranks

Sorry for the political note again, folks, but since I was critical recently of the way GOP presidential hopefuls have to kowtow to the climate-change deniers, I should note that this isn't universal: Mitt Romney agrees that the globe is warming and humans are part of the problem.Politico/U-L item here.

And although this isn't presidential politics, the GOP congressman for the western half of the state, Charlie Bass, also agrees that human-caused global warming is real (as I noted in this post), although he disagrees with many current legislative efforts to fight the problem.

Fungi causing pine needle damage in Maine

From Maine Forest Service: AUGUSTA, Maine â Maine residents are reporting that they are seeing more and more damage throughout the state to Eastern white pine trees, particularly with the yellowing, browning and loss of needles, according to Maine Forest Service officials, under the Maine Department of Conservation.

Homeowners, landowners, and foresters should expect to see unusual and excessive shedding of infected, one-year-old tree needles over the next few weeks as needle diseases, caused specifically by three fungi, have reached epidemic proportions around the state, according to MFS Health and Monitoring staff.

Not much can be done to halt the needle loss, though good forest management can protect the trees, they said.

"It's definitely a stressor â it's certainly going to weaken the trees," William Ostrofsky, MFS forest pathologist, said. "Some will get it lightly and not be affected too much, but trees that are affected can lose about 50 percent of their needles reducing their energy sources by half. They can be severely damaged by this."

White pine normally holds two year's growth of needles, Ostrofsky pointed out. For the past few years, damage to Eastern white pine foliage has been observed throughout the state. Last year, the needle diseases became epidemic following high infection levels caused by the excessively wet summer of 2009. Although last year was somewhat drier, infection levels continued to remain unexpectedly high, resulting now in the premature shedding of the one-year-old needles, the forest pathologist said.

Several fungi appear to be the cause of the needle damage, with three fungi of particular importance, Ostrofsky said. Brown spot needle blight, or Mycosphaerella dearnessii, and white pine needlecast, or Canavirgella banfieldii, were known from previous years, and this spring, another needle pathogen, Bifusella linearis, was identified in tree stands found damaged last year, he said. All three can occur on the needles of the same tree, and each one causes similar symptoms, he said.

The trees most affected are mature and over-mature trees on poor growing sites with shallow soils, and those growing at the edge of water bodies, in wet areas, and on dry, steep slopes.

The damage is "very widespread" and affecting a large portion of the state, the forest pathologist said, adding that this week he observed damaged pines in the Leeds/Turner area. Last year, infected trees in and around western, central, and southern Maine were losing their lower, weaker branches to the disease. The needle damage has been reported from as far north as Township 7 Range 12, he said.

Ostrofsky said that the Maine Forest Service and other New England states in cooperation with the USDA Forest Service are conducting a regional survey to more accurately delineate the range of the fungi across northern New England. The survey will continue this summer and is expected to be completed early next year, he said. Ostrofsky added that changing tree stand conditions will require regular monitoring for the next few years to better assess management risks to the affected pines.

No fungicides are being recommended to control the spread of the diseases, Ostrofsky said.

"There are not a lot of things anyone can do, but one thing that can be done is not disturb the trees by doing any thinning," he said. Other forest management practices that might disturb affected tree stands also should be avoided, he said.

Eastern white pine is a significant tree in Maine, with 477 million white pine trees, 1-inch in diameter or larger, according to the most recent survey done in 2009, Ken Laustsen, MFS biometrician said. White pine makes up 2 percent of all Maine trees and 4 percent of all commercial softwood, he said. In 2009, the stumpage value of the species amounted to $32 million worth of white pine pulpwood and saw timber.

For more information on white pine needlecast, go to:http://www.maine.gov/doc/mfs/WhitePineNeedlecast.htm

June 11, 2011

Network breaches are inevitable says depressing Globe story

The Globe's Hiawatha Bray has a long, depressing story today that says, basically, all computer networks and their data are vulnerable and getting more so: "Sntivirus and other commercial security software products may be adequate against the kind of amateur hackers who vandalized websites in the Internet's early days, but they often fail to detect the custom-made attack programs, or malware, created by today's organized crime gangs and foreign intelligence agencies."

Here's the story, although since it's the weekend maybe you want to skip it until Monday.

June 12, 2011

Building a "shadow Internet" to go around the bad guys

Here's a job any thriller-loving geek would like to have: "a group of young entrepreneurs who look as if they could be in a garage band are fitting deceptively innocent-looking hardware into a prototype "Internet in a suitcase." Financed with a $2 million State Department grant, the suitcase could be secreted across a border and quickly set up to allow wireless communication over a wide area with a link to the global Internet."

This delightful detail is part of an NY Times story (read it here) about U.S. efforts to create mobile networks that can work around government crackdowns in places like Iran and Afghanistan. From the story:

Creating simple lines of communication outside official ones is crucial, said Collin Anderson, a 26-year-old liberation-technology researcher from North Dakota who specializes in Iran, where the government all but shut down the Internet during protests in 2009. The slowdown made most "circumvention" technologies â the software legerdemain that helps dissidents sneak data along the state-controlled networks â nearly useless, he said. "No matter how much circumvention the protesters use, if the government slows the network down to a crawl, you can't upload YouTube videos or Facebook postings," Mr. Anderson said. "They need alternative ways of sharing information or alternative ways of getting it out of the country."

June 13, 2011

Screen shot (don't bother clicking it) of solar power output for PSNH Energy Park.

Good weather for plants, lousy for solar power

The Achilles heel of solar and wind power is, of course, variability. Our wet, cloudy, cool spring/early summer demonstrates this weakness perfectly.

Consider the 51-kilowatt photovoltaic system that PSNH installed on its Manchester headquarters. Its output was down almost 30 percent in May, compared to a year before and down almost 20 percent in April. (Above is a screenshot of their online output panel, which you can see at http://www.psnh.com/RenewableEnergy/About-PSNH/Solar-at-Energy-Park.aspx)

In this climate, at least, you need some backup if you want PV to be a large piece of your power supply.

Of course, over this period the cost of fuel for the system stayed unchanged - zero! - even as it fluctuated wildly for traditional systems. So everything has drawbacks.

The chart indicates that May 2011 produced 5,962 kilowatt-hours vs. 8,338 iun May 2011; April 2011 produced 5,526 kWh vs. 6,750 in April 2010.

A cougar killed by SUV in Connecticut - does that say anything about them here?

Lots of people swear there are cougars (or mountain lions, which are the same thing) in New Hampshire, although wildlife officials doubt it. The doubters point to lack of hard evidence: no photos from the many automated "hunter cams" that fill the woods, no good solid footprints, no hair samples caught on barb wire fences, and no road killed big cats.

That last one showed up, to everyone's astonishment, in Connecticut last weekend. The 140-pounder was hit in Milton, Connecticut - not exactly wild lands. It is bound to be an escaped pet of some kind.Here's a Reuters story about it.

If there is any cougar in New Hampshire, it would be a similar solo escapee, since no wild population exists closer than the upper Midwest.

Here's my last blog post about cougars, in which I lament the way exciting "friend of a friend" reports get less exciting when you track them down. Here's a March 6 story of mine (complete with cool historical photos) about the designation of the Eastern cougar subspecies as extinct.

June 14, 2011

Bruins v. Canucks is shaping up like the presidential electoral college

The Bruins have the best logo in sports, I think.

If the Vancouver Canucks win the 7th game of their series with the Bruins by a margin of 11 runs or less, they will take home the Stanley Cup even though they scored fewer goals. (At the moment the cumulative score is a whopping 19-7 in favor of the Bruins, with the series tied at 3 games apiece.)

That outcome would be dismaying to New England, of course, but it would make the series a perfect metaphor for the presidential electoral college, a system that makes it possible, as happened in 2000 and three times in the 1800s),for one person to get more total votes (i.e., score more goals) and yet lose the election because they captured fewer important states (i.e., win fewer games).

If you think the electoral college is a bad way to elect presidents, then you should also think that counting games won, rather than total goals scored, is a bad way to decide the winner of the Stanley Cup, or any multiple-game series.

At least, you should think that way if sports and politics were logical - but neither one is, so I suppose this argument is moot.

My vaccine story has drawn no furious rants! Hooray, or maybe not

A few months ago the Telegraph changed it so that you have to register to post a comment on a story, using a valid email address. (We also instituted a paywall if you read too many articles per month, but that's another matter.)

This policy change has caused the number of comments to plummet, as you would expect. Somebody who is unlikely to return to our site (i.e., has no connecton to, or interest in, the Nashua area) is unlikely to bother registering even though it's free; ergo, virtually all comments now come from repeat readers and/or subscribers.

This is fine by the Telegraph, because the flyby comments had a lousy signal-to-noise ratio. They tended to be superficial rants, insulting anybody who is different than the writer (different race, different politics, or, heaven forbid, living in Massachusetts) or else were echo chambers of carbon-copy opinion from far away, made in response to some call to arms by an activitist. They almost never added anything of interest, and often swamped the good comments so you couldn't find them. No longer.

I hadn't realized how much of a difference this change made until today, however, when I wrote a story about an upcoming public hearing to help set federal vaccination policy. (Here's the story) In it, I made no bones about how discredited the arguments are that are used by anti-vaccine folks.

In past years when I've written such stories they've drawn dozens of furious comments ranting that I hate children because they know that somebody's kid once got sick several weeks after a shot, which is proof that vaccines kill, and besides vaccines have rat poison in them and I'm obviously a biased idiot in the pay of Big Pharmam etc. etc. But today's story has no comments, at least so far - nary a frenzied rant to wade through in search of actualy insight. How refreshing.

Of course, no comments also means no intelligent discussion by readers, which is too bad. This is an interesting, complicated topic, and I wonder how much reader insight we're missing via this registration policy.

Alas, nothing's perfect.

(ADDENDUM: I have gotten two phone calls, one saying that I underplayed the pain of parents of autistic children, one saying that I underplayed the pain of parents of children with meningitis.)

June 15, 2011

New England's life expectancy is high and is rising fast

A detailed new study of how life expectacy has changed in the U.S. over the period 1987-2007 shows New England, and New Hampshire in particular, doing very well. Only Coos County in the state's northern tip falls below the highest ranking of expectancy.

The study also showed, alarmingly, that life expectancy is falling in parts of the U.S. - usually poor areas with more minorities - apparently because of obesity and other chronic lifestyle conditions linked with poor medical care. You can check out an interactive map here; here's a Washington Post story about it.

Here's the data for Hillsborough County, NH:

Male life expectancy:

1987:72.5

2007: 77.3

Female life expectancy

2007: 81.4

1987: 78.8

June 16, 2011

Who owns the Arctic? UNH professor ponders that question

Popular Mechanics has a good article about the scientific and legal/governmental questions being raised as the shrinkage of Arctic sea ice makes the inaccessible suddenly accesible.UNH's Larry Mayer, director of the Center for Coastal Mapping at the university, who serves as a chief scientist aboard many expeditions to map the floor of the Arctic Ocean, is a big part of the story.

June 18, 2011

Boston is a champion city - but what about professional chess?

The Bruins won the Stanley Cup last night (which ruins the parallel tothe electoral college paradox, but such is life) and this means Boston is the first U.S. city to have won championships in the four major sports within a single decade.

But there are other professional sports in Boston beyond football, basketball, baseball and hockey - notably the Boston Blitz, members of the U.S. Chess League. They haven't won a title, darn it!

The fact that you didn't even know that a professional team chess organization exists is telling, because I've rarely encountered an organization that is worse at getting the word out than the U.S. Chess League. I have emailed/called the Blitz several times over the years to do a story and they've never responded. It's kind of a loose organization, and I don't suppose local New Hampshire coverage really matters much, but still!

June 17, 2011

Maine sees jobs, money in ocean energy

The Portland Press-Herald's Tux Turkel gets right to the point in a story today about a conference concerning generating power from the ocean: "Maine's basic goal for offshore energy is to produce electricity, but the larger potential is to develop the manufacturing capacity to supply ocean energy components to the world."

That's the "green jobs" idea, which is still in its infancy at best. But coastline-rich Maine is wise to pursue it for ocean energy, starting with research and development. The story notes "the state is poised to test a scale model of a floating offshore wind turbine next summer â¦. The prototype is meant to test technology ahead of a pilot wind farm in 2017, which will have a capacity of roughly 25 megawatts."

Here's the whole story.

All about antennas - cell phone, on the moon, and more

Tonight (Friday, June 17) at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, amateur radio Dale Clement (AF1T) will discuss how antennas send and receive radio waves. Find out why some antennas are on huge towers and why others can't be seen, what it takes to bounce a signal off the Moon or talk with the International Space Station. It's part of their Super Stellar Friday program: Details here.

Speaking of ham radio, the annual Field Day is coming up June 25-26 - a geek-fest if there ever was one!

June 18, 2011

What are the odds you live in an odd-numbered house? (Not 50/50)

What are the odds that your house number is odd, as compared to even? A Facebook pool and a little mathematical reasoning reaches the surprising conclusion that it isn't 50/50: Read it here.

My house number is even, by the way. Even-tempered, even-handed, on an even keel â¦ that's me.

June 20, 2011

Science Cafe tomorrow: "The Future of Food" - be there or be ill-informed!

My column in the Telegraph today whips up massive enthusiam to the edge of statewide hysteria for the second Science Cafe New Hampshire, which happens tomorrow evening (Tuesday, June 21, 7 p.m) at The Barley House restaurant in downtown Concord. The topic is "The Future of Food" and I hope we'll have a good mix of GM food fans, raw food advocates, growers and buyers, localvores and localvore skeptics showing up in the audience to talk with our three panelists (a professor, an organic farmer and a food buyer for the Common Man restaurant chain).

Judging from the first SCNH, on climate change, it will be two hours plus of intelligent, polite, informative discussion which actually leaves people more knowledgeable instead of just more angry.

Check out the Web site of Science Cafe New Hampshire to whet your appetite (so to speak). See you there.

Here's my column, which includes an interivew with one speaker, an attorney-turned-organic-farmer who is aiming at sales of $160,000 this year.

Uh-oh - Best Buy is suing to protect "Geek Squad" name

I don't suppose Granite Geek will ever rise to the level of their interest, but I can't help feeling a frisson of dread when I read that Best Buy, owner of the Geek Squad business, is suing companies that have Geek in their name, or geek in their advertising.

Here's a story about it.

Meanwhile, I'll crank up my legal team, Dewey Cheatham and Howe. Stand back, Best Buy, I am armed!

Why is "5683â³ a very common four-number code?

Boing Boing has a post at the moment pointing to an analysis of four-number iPhone lock codes. Nine of the top ten are obvious (0000, 1212, 2580 (the central spine of the 10-number phone keyboard), 1111, etc.) â¦ but one of them is 5683. I couldn't figure out why that one is so popular - can you?

Here's the piece (the comments told me the answer):http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/20/most-common-iphone-u.html

June 21, 2011

State's CFL bulb recycling program ends

This won't make it any easier to convince the weirdly die-hard incandescent-bulb fans to switch, but the state has cut money that supports compact fluorescent recycling programs at hardware stores. It's also against the law to put them in the garbage, because of the small amount of mercury in the base (the electricity coverts mercury to a gas, which leads to the glow, as explained in HowStuffWorks), so without recycling, what do you do? Here's the AP story.

One thing you don't do is give up on them in some anti-mercury move, because the extra power consumed by wildly inefficient incandescent bulbs releases more mercury into the air from coal-burning power plants than exists in the CFL bulb, on average - as I noted here.

I spent a lovely morning on the river - and for a good cause

The best kind of volunteering involves doing something you lenjoy, so you get pleasure as well as that lovely feeling of self-righteousness which drives most volunteering.

A case in point: This morning at 7:30 I was wading around in the crystal-clear Souhegan River, watching the sun glint off the water, the songbirds flit and fly, the minnows swim - while collecting water in a glass bottle and a little plastic bag, measuring the temperature with a thermomter hooked to my ankle, and generally feeling pretty pleased with myself.

I do it as part of the river-quality testing overseen by the Souhegan Watershed Association. My family has done it for several years - now that the kids are in college and my wife's work schedule has changed, it's up to me. Poor me, eh?

If you want to learn more, check this special page with the results.They still need some helpers, particularly in the Manchester area for the Merrimack River.

Verizon Wireless may end unlimited-data plans

IT World reports that Verizon Wireless, the dominant mobile carrier in New Hampshire, is planning to drop its unlimited-data plan next month.Here's the article.

David Pogue of the NY Times posted an intereting blog yesterday, in which he noted how the move toward "cloud computing" will collide with increasing data caps by Net providers. Who wants to store your work online if you can only get to part of it without paying more? Here's his piece.

Big North Country wind park gets federal loan guarantee

A planned 99-megawatt wind farm in Coos County has gotten a conditional loan guarantee of $136 million from the U.S. Department of Energy. Such guarantees are almost always required for large wind farms to get financing.

The proposal, called Granite Reliable Power Windpark and proposed a subsidiary of Noble Power, would be about four times the size of Lempster Mountain Wind Farm, the only wind farm in the state. Its 33 turbines would stretch roughly from Dixville to Dummer. (See my alternative energy map here for details)

The majority of the power from the project will be sold to Central Vermont Public Service and Green Mountain Power, according to an Energy Department release. WestLB AG is the lender-applicant for the project, which was submitted under the Financial Institution Partnership Program.

June 22, 2011

Another big turn-out for Science Cafe NH

We had a good 60 people crowding into the basement of The Barley House last night for the second Science Cafe New Hampshire. A whole lot more show up and we're going to have space problems.

The topic was "The Future of Food", featuring UNH professor John Carroll, organic farmer Larry Pletcher, and Brandon Miller, chef/food buyer for The Common Man restaurants.

The basic theme of the discussion was that locally grown food has exploded in the past decade, although there are still big problems with distribution and other infrastructure, such as slaughterhouses (a topic I have written about in the Telegraph) and large-animal veterinarians. A surprising amount of research and technology is behind this "renaissance" of New England farming, from high-tunnel growing that extends the season to detailed analysis of soil, fertilizer needs and microclimate.

Here's the Science Cafe NH page, which includes some "background reading" from the panelists, for more information.

The cafe will take the summer off, but returns Sept. 21 with a program on vaccines. That might tax the seating capacity of our venue!

Tussle over electric smart meters continues in Maine

Center Maine Power, the biggest electricity utility in Maine, is spending big bucks on expansion of the power grid because it wants to use more wind power - Maine is already the Northeast's leader in wind and likely to get better. As part of CMP's push it plansa $200 million project to replace 600,000 mechanical meters with wireless digital versions - "smart meters," in the vernacular - that create a two-way information flow to help it handle the flow of power on the grid better.

This idea has been opposed by folks who are suspicious that it will be used to increase their rates somehow or carry privacy concerns, which is reasonable, and by folks who think the wireless signal will make them sick or do other weird stuff, which is not reasonable. Regulators finally said that CMP had to let people opt out of wireless meters, but they'd have to pay for the privilege because it will raise the company's eventual costs.

The town council in Bath has balked at this, and CMP may sue them.Here's a Press-Herald story.

Speaking of electric power, Slate's Farhad Manjoo has a good, but depressing, article about why battery power is unlikely to replace gasoline: read it here. A key tidbit: "Today's best lithium-ion batteries can hold about 200 watt-hours per kilogramâa measure of energy densityâand they might theoretically be able to store about 400 watt-hours per kilogram. Gasoline has a density equivalent of around 13,000 watt-hours per kilogram."

June 23, 2011

A little sedan barely misses 300,000 miles, and is so disappointed it burst into flame

We've all had cars with big numbers on the odometer that we were proud of - but I doubt I'll ever top the 299,100 that Doug Earl of Fremont, NH, put on his Ford Focus. As reported in the Union-Leader today, he missed the triple-century by just 900 miles, for a very dramatic reason: The car burst into flame on the road. Read the article here, then go gaze at your odometer.

Speaking of which, there is no better measure of how much better cars are these days than high-mileage vehicles. When I was young it was surprising when a car hit 100,000 miles; I had a friend with a picture of the odometer rollover in his living room! Now 100,000 is barely the start of middle age.

Granite State Skeptics handed out cold reading "bingo cards" at John Edwards talk-to-the-dead show

The Granite State Skeptics put together an intriguing method of informing the public about a bit of hooh-hah - a few of them gathered outside the Palace Theater in Manchester on Tuesday night before the start of the show of John Edwards, whose shtick is "communicating with the dead," and handed out "bingo cards" for cold-reading terms, plus material explaining how cold reading works.

There were no confrontations, probably not a lot of minds changed (when you've shelled out $120 for a show, it takes a lot for you to say "you're right - I'm being fooled!"). But it is a notable example of how to educate, rather than annoy, the public.

Here's a Telegraph story about the gathering, which includes links to the bingo card and pamphlet.

June 24, 2011

Next "content provider" to face the digital dilemma: Comic books

Its been a looooong time since I read any comic books - not since John Romita's stint at Spider-Man, and I mean Romita Senior - but I enjoy keeping track of the industry as a weird microcosm of the whole entertainment/information/media universe. So it was intriguing to see that DC Comics is going to a digital delivery model, selling digital versions on the same day that print versions go on sale. Not surprisingly, this has some stores worried.

Heres a Globe story.

The story includes the sort of comments about value of real-world vs. digital-world interaction that retailers have been saying for years ("Customers value the interaction of coming to a store, the ambiance. We're definitely geek or nerd centers. People want to find out what's cool . . . If we didn't exist, they wouldn't have that.") but I'm dubious. I quoted storefront travel agents saying that sort of thing in the 1990s, and it didn't seem to help them much.

Wikipedia gathering in Boston on Saturday (June 25)

If you're a Wikipeida fan and/or geek, you might want to be on the Frog Pond at Boston Common tomorrow (Saturday, June 25) noon for the region's WikNic, a Wikipeidan picnic. As of the moment only a few people have signed up (as you can see here), but still - where else could you go to make "citation needed" jokes?

Alas, I've already signed up to do work on hiking trails in my town, or I'd give it a shot - if nothing else, to see what "Cooljeanius" from Concord looks like.

June 26, 2011

How many of our legislators have college degrees? The answer's not so simple

The Union-Leader does a nice job today examining a much-publicized report by the Chronicle of Higher Education about the precentage of New Hampshire legislators who have college degrees. The CHE report said New Hampshire was the lowest in the country in terms of percentage of legislators with an associate degree or higher, although it qualified the statement because information about educational attainment for a large number of our huge Statehouse body wasn't online.

The Union-Leader looked at data from the so-called Blue Book, in which legislators record facts about themselves, and found that New Hampshire isn't the worst, it's just in the bottom 10.

Here's the Union-Leader article.

Here's the original CHE report, with an interactive map. Playing with the map finds something interesting: Our legislature is well above average in the precentage of lawmakers with doctoral degrees.

Innumeracy in writers (cords of wood, in this case)

It's sweet when you catch someone else in a gross error in math. Not so great when someone catches me in such a trap.

I'm reading "At Home" by Bill Bryson. This is a book that follows the historical development of houses from pre-history to the present time. It's very well written with lots of interesting facts thrown in about everything from servant rules to the Erie Canal being the event that created New York City and American Commerce. But in the chapter on the cellar, he really screws up.

Bryson correctly states that the average colonial house required 15 to 20 cords of wood a year for heating and cooking. Then he goes on to say that would require a stack of wood 80 feet high, 80 feet wide and 160 feet long. Unfortunately, that works out to be 8000 cords or 400 times more than the real dimensions of 4 feet high, 4 feet wide and 160 feet long.

It's pretty easy when dealing with unfamiliar materials or dimensional factors to not realize you could be so far wrong. The author obviously doesn't use wood for heating and has probably never been around a woodpile with a given quantity of wood in it. A cord of wood isn't something that is easy to visualize. We who cut, stack and move wood for our winter warmth have a much more intimate feeling of just how massive this investment in personal energy can be.

I see this innumeracy a lot when comparing astronomical distances to earthly measurements. To say that the sun is 93,000,000 miles away or is 864,000 miles in diameter is completely meaningless to us ordinary people. On the other end of the measurement spectrum, a micron, a millionth of a meter is also without real meaning to us. Yet these numbers are important. Integrated circuits are getting down to the few micron size. We are approaching the point where individual atoms are parsed out with instruments unimaginable a few scant years ago. Light years to microns, we throw these units around as if we really have a feeling for them.

I can forgive Bill Bryson for his (and his editors) lapse in using the wrong values for a cord of wood. I would be no better than he in discussing ancient measuring systems for Greek amphoras, those odd shaped vessels used to ship wine.

Earle Rich Mont Vernon

June 27, 2011

A smart grid in action: 20 percent less use for more production

The huge IBM plant in Essex Junction, Vt., near Burlington, has turned its electricity service into a two-way "smart grid" and says this has helped the plant cut power use 20 percent while increasing production.

Of couse, it's a lot easier to make a smart grid inside a facility owned by a single firm than across a city or state - a benign dictator is always more efficient than a democracy - so the lessons to the wide world are limited. Still, its interesting to see the extent of savings that just improving the grid can provide.

Read the Burlington Free-Press article here.

Arrival of DSL ends homemade ISP in tiny NH town

My Telegraph column today talks about digital changes in the tiny border town of Mason (population about 1500). One is that it led to the end of a homemade ISP - a guy paid for a T1 line to his home and stuck a WiFi-ish antenna on the tower he had for his ham radio, selling service to 16 people; "The biggest problem was occasionally having to chastise somebody who hogged the bandwidth with excessive peer-to-peer-network use."

The other change is that it is contributing to the demise of the volunteer town Web site, which you can see here if you'd like a bit of nostalgia back to Mozilla days.

Here's the story, which isn't much longer than this blog post.

Is the 60-cycle power grid likely to slip (and make your oven clock be wrong)?

The Knight Science Journalism Tracker pointed me to an interesting story: The feds are going to experiment with letting electricity utilities slip further than normal from 60 cycles for AC current. The difference is unlikely to be noticed - except in some electronic clocks, which use 60-cycles-per-second as their digital tick-tock.

Egad! What if your TV didn't start recording a show on time! Egad! Egad!!

Here's the AP story. From the story:

No one is quite sure what will be affected. This won't change the clocks in cellphones, GPS or even on computers, and it won't have anything to do with official U.S. time or Internet time. But wall clocks and those on ovens and coffeemakers â anything that flashes "12:00â³ when it loses power â may be just a bit off every second, and that error can grow with time.

It's not easy figuring what will run fast and what won't. For example, VCRs or DVRs that get their time from cable systems or the Internet probably won't be affected, but those with clocks tied to the electric current will be off a bit, Matsakis said.

Verizon 4G best in Boston, AT&T good elsewhere

PC Magazine did drive tests for 3G/4G networks around the country, using Android phones. they didn't come up to NH since 4G services such as Verizon's LTE aren't here. But around Boston, they said, "while T-Mobile's HSPA+ 21 network is also speedy, Verizon's 4G is by far the fastest. Outside the metro areas, AT&T offered the best balance of speed and coverage."

Here's their report.

June 28, 2011

An advertising campaign with lots of graphic sex that's aimed at monkeys

There's no New England angle to this story, but I can't resist: New Scientist reports that a primatologist at Yale's Comparative Cognition Lab (hey - there's a New England angle!) is studying whether billboards can affect the behavior of captive brown capuchin monkeys, which often behave in human-ish ways. They'll "pitch" two similar foods (probably different-colored Jell-o) with big pictures. From the story:

One billboard shows a graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed, alongside the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the capuchin troop associated with brand A. Olwell expects brand A to be the capuchins' favoured product. "Monkeys have been shown in previous studies to really love photographs of alpha males and shots of genitals, and we think this will drive their purchasing habits."side the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the capuchin troop associated with brand A.

Here's the article. The magazine promises to keep us posted on the results.

I can't decide if this idea is just funny, or really depressing. Meanwhile, please click on all the ads on my site - otherwise we might start showing monkey genetalia.

Fish & Wildlife reports how climate change is affecting each of the 50 states (ticks and moose for us)

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has been running a series of articles, one for each state, highlighting adverse effects of "increasing climate change" (wow - a government agency that doesn't mince words!). Topics include stress on pelicans in North Dakota, streams in Oklahoma, and Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

For New Hampshire, the item concerned ticks and moose. It notes that study a state study from 2001-2006 "found winter ticks accounted for 41 percent of all moose deaths in the state over a five-year period. That was nearly the same percentage of collared moose killed by hunting and moose-vehicle collisions combined. Virtually all the calf deaths during the study were due to winter ticks." The problem? Warmer winters kill off fewer ticks, making moose more vulnerable: "If there's no snow on the ground in March or April, engorged female ticks that fall off moose survive to lay their eggs in June. That produces a larger tick population in the fall when they are ready to quest again. Warmer temperatures and less snow in the fall means the ticks can continue questing for a longer period of time, infecting moose at a higher rate."

June 29, 2011

GPS interference concerns raised in N.H. by national 4G proposal

A proposal by a company called LightSquared to create a whole 4G-LTE network that combines wired and satellite transmission over what's known as the L Band has a lot of people up in arms. They are worried about interference with the GPS spectrum, which is adjacent to the L Band. The company needs an FCC waiver to build out the ground-tower portion of the network, which has rallied the federal lobbying troops on both sides of the issue.

I don't know much about this, but am heading up to Concord this morning to attend a press conference and become an instant expert, or at least the journalism equivalent of one. The conference is being held by one of our congressman, Charlie Bass, with thehead of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, several other New Hampshire airport folks, a representative of New Hampshire Fish and Game, which is worried about interference with back-country rescue work, and the state's broadband director, Carol Miller (known to many state geeks as the former vice-president of North Country Internet Access, way up in Berlin).

More details about the clash between wireless broadband and GPS

In a follow-up to my earlier post, here's the Telegraph story about concerns with plans for a national wholesale 4G wireless network that might bleed into GPS signals:

Story is here.

The official website about GPS talks about this issue on its front page,here.

Smart grid, including meters, get voter OK in Burlington, Vt.

The city of Burlington has approved a plan for a "smart grid" in the city even though it will cost $13.5 million and will involve at least some wireless meters that have drawn some opposition in Maine. The major concerns, judging from the Burlington Free-Press story (read it here), were financial rather than technical, but they were overcome by the belief that upgrading the "dumb pipes" of the current power grid is a necessary step to holding down rates in the long term.

From the story: "The vote fast-tracks negotiations with vendors, which might begin installing meters, sensors and communication gear by the end of the year."

June 30, 2011

The Transition "roadable aircraft" during its first proof-of-concept flight.

âFlying car' gets another broost from the feds

Terrafugia, the Massachusetts folks trying to create a "roadable aircraft" - a.k.a. "flying car" - says the National Highway Transportation Administration has given them some waivers on things like tires and safety glass. This is part of the process for melding standards used in aircraft and in autos. Here's a quick item from Mass High Tech.

The MHT article doesn't mention that Terrafugia announced a couple weeks ago that it was pushing back its roll-out schedule because it had "encountered a number of the challenges that are common in aircraft development programs, including problems with third party suppliers." First delivery date is now "late 2012."

If an earthquake happens in the forest and nobody notices, did it make a tremblor?

The Union-Leader has a refreshingly realistic story about a couple of small (under 3 on the Richter scale) âquakes that were recorded near Gilmanton yesterday. Realistic, because nobody felt them, and the paper didn't fall into the TV-news trap of trying to make the event seem dramatic regardless of the circumstances.

This USGS map records all U.S. quakes over the last seven days.

Granite Geek Archive 2011

July 2011

July 1, 2011

Maps by NOAA

NH is getting warmer, along with the US as a whole

The "average" temperature in New Hampshire was about half a degree Fahrenheit warmer in the 1981-2010 period than in the 1971-2000 period, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. That's roughly the same amount that temperatures have risen in the U.S. as a whole - compared to places like the Upper Midwest, which saw the average go up by twice as much. The Southeast U.S. saw the smallest rise over that period, although it's still a rise.

NOAA establishes these 30-year norms to compare annual temperature swings, and updates them each decade.

Here's the release, with links to all sorts of downloadable data sets if you're in a number-crunching mood.

July 3, 2011

Is this the end of the Space Age?

The Economist magazine has a cover story arguing that the final launch of the Space Shuttle marks the end of the Space Age, because the cost and difficulty of doing anything with humans even as close as Mars is far greater than any reward that most people value.

They argue that private ventures like SpaceX won't ever get beyond low-Earth orbit to any meaningful extent, and that China and and India will quickly reach the same conclusion as the US and Russia about the cost/benefit ratio of manned flight, since they don't even have a Cold War to spur them on. From the article:

The heroic phase of space exploration, with chiselled-jawed astronauts venturing where no man has gone before, inspiring schoolchildren and defending democracy (or socialism), is now a thing of the past. Mr Obama's plan may revitalise NASA and send American astronauts into the solar system once again. But the agency's history as a political football suggests it is unlikely.

Read it here (I think it's available to non-subscribers, although it's hard to tell these days.)

July 4, 2011

Creationism trying to sneak into New Hampshire laws

On this Independence Day, let us celebrate academic independence by noting with disapproval that two New Hampshire lawmakers want to bring creationism into public school science classes. as I note in my telegraph column (which ran yesterday, because we don't have a paper on July 4), two possible bills may come up in the fall to get creatonism into the classroom. One would mandate teaching "intelligent design", the other would mandate teaching evolution "as a theory".

Both lawmakers agree there are theological/philosophical elements to their proposals - one wants to examine how much atheism is being the push for evolution in classes; the other is concerned by the lack of a deeper meaning in evolution. I argue in the column that evolution, linking us to the understandable reality of the universe, has more meaning that an arbitrary creation by some other-worldly being or beings, but I also note that the argument is irelevant: Science classes should teach science.

This is the official NASA shuttle page

July 5, 2011

Can existing dams return to hydropower? Start-up says yes

The Telegraph has a profile of Blue2Green, an Ashland NH start-up that wants to retrofit existing dams to create small-scale hydropower. Read it here.

(Note that the company's website is http://www.blue2greenllc.com - that's Blue2Green LLC, or "limitied liability corporation" - because blue2green is already taken by a photographer.)

Watching a dozen fireworks displays at once from Temple Mountain

I'm not a big fireworks fan, so last night, instead of swatting mosquitos and waiting in traffic to watch a display, I went up Temple Mountain with my wife and a friend, to see how many displays we could watch at once.

We saw a dozen, although some were barely visilbe through the trees (Temple isn't like Mount Mondanock with its 360-degree clear views); we also could hear what I assume was Peterborough's display, but couldn't see it because the hill blocked it. Many of the displays were tiny, of course - they might as well have been colorful fireflies - but it was fun.

It was an incredibly gorgeous night, too; warm breeze keeping away the mosquitos. Sometimes things just work out.

We were on the former ski area that is now a state-owned recreation area, traversed by the Wapack Trail. If you're ever looking for a nice day hike in southern N.H., consider it.

July 6, 2011

Renewable energy (mostly wood, hydropower) passes nuclear power in US

Renewable energy sources - much of it large-scale hydropower, but also geothermall, biomass (burning wood), solar and wind), generated 2.245 quadrillion Btus of energy, or 11.7 percent of U.S. energy production, according to this report from DomesticFuel.

During this same time period, renewable energy production surpassed nuclear energy power by 5.65 percent. In total, energy produced from renewables is 77.15 percent of that from domestic crude oil production.

This isn't quite as much of a change as it seems, since virtually all the hydropower and much of the wood-burning power has existed for years. Still, it's pretty cool.

July 8, 2011

Final shuttle takes off on schedule

UPDATE: It went off on time!

As of right now (6:30 a.m.), there's a 70 percent change of thunderstorms in mid-Florida, so Atlantis is unlikely to launch in five hours as scheduled. But you never know.

Memories of a UNH satellite as the shuttle ends

From David Sims at UNH News Service:

DURHAM, N.H. â When the Space Shuttle Atlantis lifts off from Florida's Kennedy Space Center this Friday morning for its final voyage, it will bring to a close the ship's 27-year flight history, the 30-year run of the shuttle program itself, and a chapter of space science history at the University of New Hampshire.

Space scientists and technicians from the UNH Space Science Center (SSC) were key members of the team that built the Imaging Compton Telescope (COMPTEL) onboard the 17-ton Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) that was lofted into space and placed into orbit by Atlantis astronauts back in 1991. The second of NASA's Great Observatories, at the time the science satellite was the heaviest astrophysical payload ever placed in orbit by a shuttle, and the delicate operation ended up requiring an unplanned spacewalk to fully deploy the observatory.

"The observatory had a high-gain antenna on a deployable boom," recalls Professor Mark McConnell of the SSC and department of physics and who spent the first 15 years of his career at UNH working on COMPTEL. "But when the shuttle's robotic arm lifted CGRO out of the payload bay the boom got stuck and two astronauts were sent out to yank it free and deploy the antenna. Had that not been possible, the science mission would have been severely compromised," McConnell adds.

During its operation from 1991 to 2000, when it was deorbited by NASA, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory explored the high-energy sky looking at some of the most violent and energetic processes in the universe, including black holes, solar flares, gamma-ray bursts, and pulsars. It also mapped out sites where all of the heavier elements in the periodic table are created, a process known as nucleosynthesis, which is detected by regions of strong radioactive emissions.

Says McConnell, "The universe started out with just hydrogen and helium and everything else came from the interiors of stars and supernovae. That process of creating heavier elements in supernovae in particular generates or creates a lot of radioactivity, and we were able to measure that with COMPTEL."

That measurement was made possible by the detection of gamma rays from the far reaches of our galaxy. Such detection is only possible above Earth's atmosphere and by means of large, heavy detectors such as CGRO because gamma rays are highly energetic and require a lot of mass to stop them.

"Plus, there aren't that many of them out there," McConnell said, "it's a very difficult measurement to make."

The COMPTEL experiment was headed up at UNH by Professor Jack Lockwood until his retirement, at which point Professor James Ryan took over as the principal investigator. SSC scientists and engineers who worked for years on the COMPTEL experiment and who remain at UNH include Ryan, McConnell, John Macri, Stan Ellis, and Tom Milliman.

UNH also had a legacy with the space shuttle Challenger, which performed the very first on-orbit satellite repair for the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM or SolarMax). Launched on February 14, 1980, SolarMax carried several scientific instruments that provided new insights into the nature of solar flares, including a gamma-ray spectrometer experiment led by Edward Chupp, currently professor emeritus at the SSC.

McConnell notes that COMPTEL was the first gamma-ray detector of its kind to fly in space. Over a nine-year period it picked up signals from just two dozen stars in the entire sky.

"So what we need to do is make instruments that are more sensitive and that can probe weaker sources in the sky. If we can get to a point where we're seeing hundreds or thousands of sources in sky, then we can start doing more science to broaden the understanding of the way the universe works."

UNH space scientists and engineers are currently working on projects toward that eventual goal. A significant milestone will be reached this summer with a balloon test flight of a small prototype instrument based on what was learned from COMPTEL.

The Fast Compton Telescope or FACTEL for short will be flown out of New Mexico. The principal investigator for FACTEL is Jim Ryan, with McConnell as co-investigator and SSC research assistant professor Peter Bloser, research project engineer Jason Legere, and graduate student Manuel Jullian also involved in the project.

July 9, 2011

Some things are truly beyond our understanding, like fans of Moxie

If you have never drunk Moxie, a soft drink that was created around the time of the Civil War and inexplicably failed to disappear, then consider yourself lucky. It is unbelievably foul, like cough syrup crossed with carbonated antifreeze.

But some folks love it, especially in Maine, where the inventor was born. Consider this story from the Bangor Daily New, then shake your head in befuddlement.

There truly *are* some things that are beyond human understanding

July 11, 2011

Verizon Wireless opens lab to develop 4G services

Verizon Wireless has built a big research lab in Waltham, Mass. to figure out what sort of services (streaming music? Internet-connected refrigerators? self-driving package-delivery drones controlled by your cell phone?) it can make and sell without overloading its network. It will be unveiled tomorrow; I have a press invite but don't think I can make it.

The bigger immediate news, of course is that the service is joining others in instituting a data cap. AP has a good story about the sort of decisions customers are going to have to make about usage: Read it here.

And speaking of bandwidth limits, Mass High Tech has a good piece looking at the way they are affecting various companies who sell services online or otherwise depend on lots of bandwidth. Among its points: "What many people don't realize is that the available bandwidth problem is being compounded by the rapid growth of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications that use wireless technology as all or part of its communication process â things such as remote equipment relaying status updates to a home office and truck fleets transmitting location and condition reports." Read it here.

Use your pool filter to spot invasive insects

My Telegraph column today talks about a really cool new program started by the state, in which they sign up people who have swimming pools and ask them to identify all the bugs that are caught in the filter each week. The idea is to help spot invasive insects - particularly the dreaded Asian longhorn beetle - as they sneak into the state.

Read the column here. And if you've got a pool, sign up!

Even if you don't have a pool, you can enjoy the cool silhouette pattern at left, used to help ID the insects you find.

Skeptics in the Pub, tonight in Manchester (new location)

UPDATE: Wings Your Way is temporarily closed, so the meeting will be at Shaskeen, 909 Elm St Manchester, (603) 625-0246

Granite State Skeptics are holding their monthly-ish gathering, Skeptics in the Pub, tonight (Monday, July 11) ~~at Wings Your Way~~ in Manchester. It starts at 7 p.m. and runs a couple of hours.

Be there or be naive!

Here's the group's Facebook page.

July 12, 2011

Save endangered mudpuppies or battle invasive lampreys - a Vermont quandary

Nobody said being an environmentalist was easy. Vermont is demonstrating that right now, because attempts to save the endangered mudpuppy, a river-bottom-dwelling salamander, are colliding with attempts to get rid of sea lampreys, a fish-destroying nuisance species. From the Burlington Free-Press:

Mudpuppies share the river bottom with larval sea lampreys, perhaps Vermont's least popular species. As adults, lamprey prey on popular gamefish in Lake Champlain. The state and federal governments are committed to killing lamprey by applying pesticides to rivers in the Champlain basin where they spend their early years. Mudpuppies die as collateral damage, sometimes in large numbers.

Lampreys aren't invasives, but their population has exploded, due probably to pollution and other man-made changes to the ecosystem

Why does sea salt build up on power lines?

The NY Times has a big story about the drought affecting much of the South, and I was surprised by this item:

In Texas, some cities are experiencing blackouts because airborne deposits of salt and chemicals are building up on power lines, triggering surges that shut down the system. In times of normal weather, rain usually washes away the environmental buildup. Instead, power company crews in cities like Houston are being dispatched to spray electrical lines.

So far as I can tell, the salt some from sea air, which builds up on insulators, eventually conducting electricity where it shouldn't go. So I guess this could be a problem if there was a long drought on our Seacoast, as well.

Sunscreen Information

This is the time of year when applying sunscreen is most important. Some of us can't stand to be inside in the shop when the weather is so nice outside. But, as we are continually told, too much sun can be a problem. The usual protection methods of wearing clothing to cover up (too hot!) or slapping on sunscreen (messy!) can be inconvenient.

The best information compilation I've seen in quite a while on sunscreen confusion is posted on the Information is Beautiful website.

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Everyone should take a look at this to cut through the advertising hype and get to the truth of the matter.

Earle Rich

July 13, 2011

A "makerspace" opens in Nashua - lots of tools, lots of goofiness

I have a profile in the Telegraph today of Make It Labs, a new "makerspace" that has opened in an industrial part of Nashua, next to the railyards.

I'm not a handy guy - my wife is the tool-wielding primate in our household - but I found the place an irresistible mix of hacker playfulles and workshop practicality. It's enough to make me pick up a soldering iron and/or welding torch, and see how long it takes me to hurt myself. They've got an open house every Monday and Thursday evening.

Here's the story. Here's their Web site.

If the trash can is tiny, you think twice about throwing stuff away

When staff at Dartmouth College were given tiny trash cans - I've seen Slurpee cups that are bigger - to handle their non-recyclable materials, they reduced the amount of stuff they sent to the landfill by 200 tons. The move was part of a sustainability program at the university that takes advantage of human nature rather than technology: "The point of the program is to make trash even more personal by asking people to ponder just how much they're throwing out," says this New York Times blog post.

I remember being astonished at how little stuff ended up in the family trash can when our town started recycling paper, several years ago. I couldn't believe how much of our trash volume had been envelopes and newspapers and the like.

Changes in normal temperatures. Source: NOAA

Our Januarys are getting warmer, our Julys not so much

January is getting warmer in New Hampshire, but July might be getting slightly cooler, according to new data by National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA recalculated the 30-year "normal" temperatures around the country for each month, based on data from the first decade of this millennium, and found that the January minimums had risen in much of the country, including N.H., whereas the July maximums hadn't risen as much, and have gone down slightly in New England

On a statewise basis, our annual low temperatures are rose by more than half a degree in a decade, while our annual high temperatures rose by perhaps a quarter of a degree. This means that we don't have to worry about summers becoming brutal as much as we have to worry about winters becoming wimpy.

Here's the whole article, with many facts to chew on.

July 14, 2011

Morse Code lives, at least for one night (.... -- .-. .--.-)

On Tuesday, three marine broadcast stations - none in the Northeast, alas - participated in an annual Morse Code broadcast event sponsored by the non-profit Maritime Radio Historical Society (whose Web site has a very cool masthead design). The event is nostalgic, but also taps into a lingering fear among the emergency-communications community that the time will come when we'll be sorry we forgot Morse Code, which is the most robust long-distance communications form ever invented.

If a hurricane destroys all the power line,s cell phone towers and phone lines, you can still send dits and dahs using a battery, a few connections, and a wire antenna tossed over a tree limb. As long as there's somebody who understands it, of course.

Here's an NY Times story about the event.

July 15, 2011

Northeast Link power line map

A 200-mile gigawatt power line that will be buried? Well, maybe

News came out earlier this week that a couple of utility companies want to build a roughly 1-gigawatt high voltage DC power line from mid Maine, down the coast to eastern Massachusetts, to carry energy from Maine's wind farms as well as hydro and nuclear power in eastern Canada.

The really interesting thing is that they proposal to bury it rather than string it on towers. One of the groups opposed to the similar Northern Pass proposal wants that line buried, but its owners say the idea is too expensive and outlandish to even study. Northern Pass would build about 40 miles of new lines through pristine northern N.H. forests before joining an existing right-of-way, all to bring a gigawatt of Quebec hydopower down to New England,

Burying high-voltage lines is a problem with AC power because of temperature buildup and other issues, but it works well with high-voltage DC. At least, it works well in theory, because I'm darned if I can find any examples of long-distance high-voltage DC that have actually been buried, except for underwater cables. There's lots of talk about it,

and designs for various containment pipes, but if anybody has actually built one as an alternative to stringing lines on towers, I'd love to hear about it. (The similar-sized HVDC Champlain Hudson Power Express, a proposed power line from Canada to New York City, plans to be buried in railroad rights of way for 73 miles, but most of the way it will laid underwater.)

As for the new Maine-to-Mass. plan, called Northeast Energy Link, it seems a little premature to label it as a buried line. So far the owners have only applied to the feds for approval of their funding approach. A spokesman responded to my query about rights-of-way and construction/financial details by saying that NEL "is in the very early stages of development and as you know is being proposed as an underground, high voltage direct-current line, but the project isn't yet far enough along to get into the details on trenching, etc.

July 17, 2011

Going out in a kayak to uproot water chestnuts

We're heading out this morning to the upper reaches of the Nashua River to help the Nashua River Watershed Association pull up invasive water chestnuts - a nice way to get on the river on a hot day and feel virtuous. It's a nasty, pond-choking plant, not related to the Chinese restaurant food.

Dollar coins are great

I don't understand the reluctance of the american public to use the 'gold' dollar coins that the government is minting in great quantities. I buy them from the bank, usually four rolls at a time. They are great for tolls and restaurent tips. They also work better than bills in vending machines. Still I'm amazed at how many people tell me that they've never received these coins before even though they've been out for several years. I just know that they are going to wind up in their kids piggy banks so are effectively out of circulation.

In all my travels, I've used the Canadian loonies (and twonies), the New Zealand kiwis, the English pound coins and the Euro coins in Spain. These coins are so much handier than dragging out my wallet, sorting through similar looking paper currency and then receiving another handful of change to go into the pocket.

When I was in the Navy, we would sometimes be paid in two dollar bills, usually when the local populace grumbled about all those military people creating problems in town. As soon as they saw all those rare bills being circulated, the objections just went away. Perhaps we need to do something like that to get these coins in circulation. A big business like Walmart or Target could pass these out for some limited time instead of bills for change. Still, I've had people strongly object to receiving them. A friend works in a yogurt shop. He doesn't have a dedicated drawer for the coins so its an inconvenience for him. Is that common? I should ask.

July 19, 2011

Some of N.E.'s commercial airports rely on subsidies to keep service

Lebanon in New Hampshire, Rutland in Vermont. and four airports in Maine are among the small airports around the country where carriers get a federal subsidy to keep commercial service going. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have none; here's the list, in PDF form.

I found this out about this Essential Air Service Program because of an NY Times story about how Delta wants to cut service to 24 small townsin the Midwest, including South Dakota's capital, Pierre (which is almost as small as airport-less Montpelier) unless its subsidies are boosted. (Story here) The subsidies are set to end in 2013 unless Congress extends them, and these days Congress isn't doing a whole lot.

And speaking of flying, do pilots prefer to fly Boeing or Airbus? Patrick Smith of Salon says "there aren't two camps of pilot out there, with one that swears by the Boeing camp and another loyal to Airbus. Sure, a pilot might prefer one over the other, but it's probably just a case of whatever he or she is used to." Check out his coumn here.

Vermont Yankee has an interesting deicison to make about refueling

A judge has rejected Vermont Yankee's attempt to put the question of its future on hold while it sues the state of Vermont, which wants it to shut when its license runs out next March. (See story about judge's ruling here.)

This leaves it with a problem, as the NY Times notes: It is scheduled to shut in October and load up with 18 months of fuel. If it buys all that fuel and then is shut down, it has a problem; if it doesn't buy more fuel then it might not be able to last until March, no matter what. As if nuclear engineering wasn't complicated enough

Speaking of local power plants, Seabrook Station's attempt to get its 20-year license renewed early has run into an obstacle: The discovery that some below-ground concrete has been degraded by seawater, leading to leaks and fear of corrosion. Portsmouth Herald story here

Reddit cofounder hacked into MIT to set free 4 million scientific papers

The cofounder of Reddit and fellow at Harvard's University's Center for Ethics alleged hacked into MIT to "free" 4 million scientific papers from JSTOR, which provides access to a gazilion journals and papers from subscriber research institutions.

As reported by the Globe, "Aaron Swartz, 24, was charged with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He faces up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine." The Globe says that MIT already settled this with Swartz, oddly enough.

From the story (read the whole thing here):

Swartz allegedly broke into a computer wiring closet in a basement at MIT to access MIT's network without authorization from a computer switch within that closet. The access allowed him to download materials from JSTOR, a non-profit archive of scientific journals and academic work. Authorities allege Swartz hacked into the system to distribute JSTOR's archives through file-sharing sites.

Find out more from Boing Boing here, and read the comments, including commentary from a researcher who uses JSTOR and sees the conflict between trying to make research information freely accessible, and trying to pay the salaries of people who do the research.

July 20, 2011

Bike-sharing program set to begin in Boston

I'm dubious as to whether bicycle usage can really reduce the use of motorized vehicles in this country, but there's no doubt that the rage for bicycle-sharing programs is cool. One is coming to Boston soon (Globe story here) and I'll have to go down and try it out, although I'm a lousy bicyclist and have never biked in the city.

I'd love to see them start a program for sharing electric bikes - that would be fun.

Some folks, like D.C. and Paris, have really embraced the programs - but I suspect they're mostly used by tourists and/or for novelty rides, not actual transportation. That's just a guess, though. New York City may launch a program, too.

Electric cars: Nissan Leaf coming to Mass. soon but not NH; Chevy Volt inching closer

Nissan's slow rollout of its electric car, the Leaf, will extend to Massachusetts dealers this fall, according to CNet. No news yet when they'll be sold by New Hampshire dealers.

The Chevy Volt hasn't made it to N.H. yet, although you can order one through some local dealers if you don't mind waiting a few months for delivery. MacMulkin Chevrolet in Nashua expects to have a show model on the lot next month, although it won't have floor models to sell for a while due to GM's cautious rollout.

The Wheego, an intriguing startup assembled in the US from various components including a Chinese body, is available in Hudson NH at Nashua Subaru, and the dealer plans to set up shop under the name eCars in Reading, Mass.

Speaking of electric cars, here's an object lesson: A startup trying to make a highway-ready electric three-wheeler has collapsed, taking $500,000 in funding from a California city with it. Story here.

July 21, 2011

US has no manned spacecraft now â¦ which is OK by me

Atlantis landed safely last night, ending the jack-of-some-trades-master-of-none space shuttle program and leaving the U.S. with no way to launch a human into space. My teenage self would be appalled but I'm fine with that - the whole space program needs a huge reboot, and this might give us the chance to do it. Let's see if China can do anything interesting in the next few years, while SpaceX and other private firms tackle low Earth orbit.

Among the interesting ideas: Google's $30 prize for a private company to land a non-human on the moon. NY Times story here.

July 22, 2011

80 degrees at 6:30 a.m.! Overnight heat is worse than daytime heat

The heat wave moving across the U.S. hit us yesterday. It may hit 100 degrees today.

More startling, though, is the fact that it was 80 degrees when I got up. I have never seen that in my 21 years living in New Hampshire.

This Treehugger post (here) talks about how unusually high overnight temperatures are worse for health and some crops than unusually high daytime temperatures, because they don't give a chance to cool off between blasts. In the U.S., at least, nighttime temperatures have risen more in the past decade than daytime temperatures.

July 23, 2011

150 electric car charging stations coming to Boston, probably

It's hard to know how much of this is vaporware, but Coulomb Technologies now says it will install at least 150 electric car-charging stations in Boston, and is looking for businesses to apply. They've got a Google Map and other interactive stuff, so I supposed it's real. Short Mass High Tech article here.

150 is a nice start, but it isn't much really - think of how many gas pumps there are in Boston, if I may tweak the classic recruiter "watch you think aloud" question.

July 24, 2011

Today's geek/crime lesson: Don't 'wardrive' if the cops are looking for you

From Saturday's Telegraph:

A 23-year-old Merrimack man's search for free Internet service earned him a trip to jail early Friday morning.

Merrimack Police were called to Mallard Point Road around 1:30 a.m. Friday for the report of a suspicious vehicle. The caller had noticed a small red SUV parked in the area and remembered seeing it driving slowly around the neighborhood earlier, police said.

Police located the 1999 red Chevy Tracker parked on the side of the road, and Kevin Illsley, 23, last known address of 10 Drake Lane, was inside using an unsecured wireless network to surf the Web on his phone, police said.

Officers conducted a record check and learned the Illsley was wanted on a bench warrant for failing to appear at Nashua's district court on a controlled-drug charge, police said.

Illsley was arrested and held at the Merrimack Police Department on $1,000 cash bail, and was expected to be arraigned at Merrimack's district court on Friday, police said.

July 25, 2011

I've never seen preferred parking for hybrids and LEVs (LEVs?) before

I have a story in the Telegraph (read it here) about the new state liquor store in town, which has prominent parking signs close to the front door saying "Hybrid/LEV Vehicles Only". (Actually, they wrote it all in caps, so it reads like it should be Hybrid/Lev Vehicles Only, but I don't think there are any cars named after the former currency of Belgium.)

I hadn't seen preferred parking for hybrids around here before, although it seems it has existed for a couple of years under the LEED building program. I'm not sure how you know whether your car is a Low-Emission Vehicle (not "light electricity vehicle", as I thought). Do they give you a gold star or something?

The comments on the story are mostly of the "fie on arrogant eco-snobs!" category.

Vermont Yankee will refuel, despite uncertainty over its future

Despite the uncertainty about whether the state of Vermont will allow it to continue operating past March, the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant's owner, New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., says it will spend $60 million to refuel the plant. (AP story here)

The feds have already given an OK for its license to be extended another 20 years past the end of its license, so this decision may be an indication that the company is confidence Vermont will come around, too. Vermont is the only state which must give the OK for relicensing of nuclear plants within its borders; for everybody else, only the federal government needs to say OK.

N.H. firm's facial-recognition software popular with police

Animetrics, a Conway, N.H.-based firm, has algorithms for turning 2D photos of faces into 3D software objects to aid facial recognition searches. The system is part of a system that lets law enforcement turn smartphones into facial scanners. (Article here by Singularity Hub) The system, combined with iris scanners, was developed to identify inmates in large prisons so they couldn't sneak away, but will soon be seen on a street near you. Another stake in the heart of anonymity.

Animetrics says its system "is designed to accommodate images where the yaw rotation of the face (rotation about the vertical, or y-axis) is +/- 45 degrees or as long as both eyes are visible in the image plane. Animetrics90 implements 2D-3D normalization through the generation of the 3D model for every image processed by the system. The 3D model is generated through the use of an a priori mathematical model of faces generally, advanced image analysis and feature extraction, and advanced techniques for deriving precise pose (or rotation) estimates from an input image.

July 26, 2011

Another thing the Internet has demolished: Pop music charts

As a kid, I used to love reading the weekly "top singles" chart in our local newspaper (the now-defunct Washington Star - this was pre-Watergate, when the Post and Star were neck and neck). It listed the top 10 singles for a half dozen local radio stations, and since this was when in the early British Invasion, when the whole pop-music scene was exploding, my pre-pubescent self was fascinated to compare how the different stations ranked "Hard Days Night" vs. "Satisfaction" vs. "I Get Around."

That pleasure is denied today's youth, though, because the fracturing of the Net business means sales charts don't mean much - as the Washington Post (not Star!) reports here. It seems a bunch of startups are trying to be Billboard 2.0, mixing sales figure with various vague social-media and/or download parameters: "The Ultimate Chart tracks how music is shared, streamed and purchased across more than 100 different platforms, with each outlet weighted by its perceived importance. Sales matter the most. Buying a full album on iTunes or in physical form affects the Ultimate Chart much more dramatically than streaming a song on Pandora."

But as the article says: "The future of these emerging charts may hinge on whether they can draw a meaningful line between buzz and commerce."

A highway marker for New Hampshire's UFO-abduction pioneers

The New Hampshire Division of Historical Resources and other cultural groups have installed one of those historical markers opposite the "Indian Head" formation in North Lincoln, commemorating the time that Betty and Barney Hill were abducted by UFO aliens. This was the first such report ever to go public, and despite its rather (shall we say) unusual nature, the whole weird story has entered Granite State lore to the point that the Hills papers are kept at UNH for study.

Here is the wording on the plaque:

On the night of September 19-20, 1961, Portsmouth, N.H. couple Betty and Barney Hill experienced a close encounter with an unidentified flying object and two hours of "lost" time while driving south on Rte 3 near Lincoln. They filed an official Air Force Project Blue Book report of a brightly-lit cigar-shaped craft the next day, but were not public with their story until it was leaked in the Boston Traveler in 1965. This was the first widely-reported UFO abduction report in the United States.

Here's an excellent blog post about the process of getting the plaque, written by Kathleen Marden, who is the Hills' neice and has become their most public advocate. (She frequently tweaks the wikipedia article about the abduction, for example.)

Here's a link to the UNH collection of the Hill's papers.

Nearby Indian Head Resort, which knows a good thing when it sees it, is is holding an event Sept. 23-25 to mark the 50th anniversary of the "abduction", hosted by Marden. It will include a guided tour of the route the Hills took.

Mountain lion killed in Conn. had walked there from South Dakota

DNA testing indicates that the mountain lion killed by a car in Connecticut last month indicates that it was from a wild population in South Dakota and - here's the amazing part - appears to have traveled by itself, since its DNA matched that of a cat which traveled through Wisconsin and Minnesota. The state environmental agency said this is the longest distance a mountain lion has been known to travel, according to this story.

When the mountain lion's body was found, officials assumed it was an escapee from an illegal private zoo.

The fact that a wild cat traveled 1,500 miles raises hopes of people who think they've seen mountain lions (a.k.a. cougars or panthers) in New Hampshire. There are no official populations of these big cats east of Illinois, although they are slowly moving in our direction.

I have written about mountain lions and local lack thereof a few times, most recently after the subspecies Eastern Mountain Lion was declared officially extinct (read it here). After all such stories I get lots of emails, calls or Web postings declaring that somebody or other hass definitely seen a mountain lion hereabouts; I have chased down several of the more promising of these claims and they have always dissolved in the light of close examination - alas.

July 27, 2011

Board to back interim nuclear-fuel storage in 'centralized' spot

The U.S. should find a long-term replacement for Yucca Mountain as a place to store spent nuclear fuel, but in the meantime should find a short-term (decades or more) "centralized" location to store the fuel that's piling up at nuclear plants around the country. That is likely to be the recommendation of a blue ribbon commission studying nuclear waste disposal, according to this report from Platts, a power-industry publication.

About 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel is sitting at nuclear plants around the country; most in dry casks but some in the sort of pools that have caused problems at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan. Vermont Yankee uses pools, and has more fuel stored than at those damaged reactors. Seabrook Station uses dry storage. (Detailed report of that storage here.)

Platts makes the recommendation sound pretty content-free - specifically, it doesn't recommend actual site(s) for the interim storage.

Hmmm â¦ I have a largely unused chicken house on my property and could probably work out a pretty decent rental arrangement. Hey, somebody's got to pay the kids' college loans off!

July 28, 2011

Who tested the DNA to confirm the Dakota-to-Connecticut mountain lion?

The surprising news that the mountain lion killed by a car in Connecticut had walked over the course of a couple of years from South Dakota led me to wonder who exactly figured this out. (Older post on the subject here) Turns out it was the Forest Service Wildlife Genetics Laboratory in Missoula, Montana, which does DNA tests on collected samples of hair, scat and carcasses of mountain lions throughout the country..They do this sort of analysis all the time, it seems: A look through their "news" section finds reports of them confirming the origin of lots of road-killed mountain lions - except that all of them are west of Chicago. Until now.

They do some other cool stuff, too, including a project called "Determining Fisher distribution in the Rocky Mountains." For some reason, I'd always thought that fishers (a large cousin of the weasel) were Eastern animals.

'Beetle-sniffing dogs' may be unleashed on Worcester's infested trees

Some more trees infested with Asian longhorn beetles have been found in Worcester, Mass., as the Telegraph-Gazette reports in this story. The infestation has now led to a staggering 30,000 trees being destroyed; the story calls it the biggest ALB site in North America.

The really interesting tidbit was this: "trained beetle-sniffing dogs will be brought from Georgia to Worcester County in mid-August to try to locate the elusive beetles." A little online hunting finds lots of reports about dogs being used to sniff out bedbugs - The Atlantic magazine had this story - but nothing about them sniffing Asian longhorn beetles.

There are dogs which have been trained to sniff out invasive weeds, however, as this story reports.

July 29, 2011

Vermont utility coop goes for "big wind", big time

Large-scale wind projects have always had a mixed environmental image: Good alternative to burning fossil fuels for electricity, bad disruption of relatively pristine ridgelines or mountaintops. In Vermont, that debate has shifted in favor of big wind, which got a big boost after with the Vermont Electric Cooperative voting more than 4-1 to build new transmission lines that are necessary for a proposed 21-turbine, 63-megawatt wind project along some three miles of Lowell Mountain ridgline, in the remote Northeast Kingdom*. Check out the Free-Press editorial here.

If a cooperative (a form of governance that brings out the cranky nay-saying liberal in many people) in Vermont (a state where "environmentalist" is most people's middle name, often preceded by "extreme") favors a big wind project in its own neighborhood, then perhaps the environmental concerns aren't as widely held as it sometimes seems.

*I love that name "Northeast Kingdom" - it's even better than "North of the Notches"

Is the Atlantic cod making a comeback? Canada thinks maybe so

Canadian researchers say that fundamental changes to the marine ecosystem off Nova Scotia have supported a rebound in stocks of cod and other groundfish that might be signs of a turnaround, years after fishing moratoriums were declared because of collapse in populations.

From the story in the Globe and Mail: "The Nature study traced the increase in cod stocks to the decline of forage fish, which prey on cod during their early life stages. The forage fish, which include species such as herring, exploded after cod stocks plummeted. However, the forage fish appear to have overrun their food supply. â¦ According to the latest count, the cod population in the waters off Nova Scotia was at 34 per cent of pre-collapse levels."

If this is a true turnaround, it's important because it shows that crashes of major ocean species can be reversed if we leave them alone. It raises hope for species like the Atlantic herring, whose catch limit is currently the topic of much debate in New Hampshire, as this story notes. Of course, it's easy for landlubbers like me to be objective; it's not an easy topic if you depend on fishing for your livelihood.

July 30, 2011

A visit to the overseers of the region's power grid

The Globe has a story today about the power-use prediction work at ISO-New England, which controls the region's power grid.Their main job on hot summer days, when power usage hits its peak (the switch away from electric heat and the addition of air conditioning means that New England no longer uses the most power in winter), is to decide how much energy will be needed that day and whether they'll need to buy any on the open market, or call in any demand response (contracted arrangements under which companies ramp back their usage when needed, in return for lower rates). From the story:

First, they consider the weather, using three different services: Will it be hot? Humid? Cloudy or cloudless? Then, they consider history: How did energy consumers react the last time temperatures rose above 90 degrees? Next, they factor in the day of the week, the time of year, even the previous day's weather.

Sounds like fun â¦ unless you get it wrong, of course.

August 2011

http://www.snopes.com/luck/chain.asp

August 1, 2011

When prizes are 'rolled down', lotteries can become profitably unfair

When it comes to playing lotteries, the key metric is expected payout - basically, the sum of potential winnings divided by the odds of a given ticket winning. If it's above 1, it's worth a shot. Those much-publicized hundred-million-dollar SuperBigBuxPayoutLottoguy games aren't any good if 300 million tickets are bought by other "you can't win if you can't play" suckers.

Lotteries never have better-than-1 payouts, because then they'd lose money - except in unusual circumstances, usually involving a contest of limited duration and set number of tickets, in which prizes are "rolled over" if they're not won early. A Milford math teacher realized this back in 2009 and bought hundreds of dollars worth of a scratch game called New Hampshire Millionaire's Club because the payoff had bloomed while the number of remaining tickets shrunk due to a shortage of winners. This raised the expected payout, and he won a million bucks.

Apparently a similar thing is happening, on a more subtle scale involving the low-end prizes, with a Massachusetts game called Cash WinFall. It works because unwon big prizes are sprinkled down to lower levels, raising the expected payout for the smaller prizes. The Globe has a detailed story here.

The payout is subtle enough that it requires buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of tickets. It requires putting together groups who descend on lots of stores, because you can't crank out that many tickes at once.

Who says math class is boring?

Mayfly hatch seen on radar in Wisconsin

So many mayflies are hatching, it shows up on radar

No local connection, but this is too cool to ignore: The current crop of mayfly hatchings along the Mississippi valley shows up on National Weather Service radar!

My fishing buddy's comment: "Trout heaven."

Here's the NSW post. I guess this phenomenon is not that uncommon.

Industrial composting is a lot more complicated than my backyard piles of stuff

My compost piles (one yard waste, one food waste - so I can play in the leaves and not worry about coffee grounds or banana peels!) are of the "cold composting" types, which means I throw everything in a pile and leave it for a couple of years. I don't even turn them.

I can do this because I have space and time. I don't care too much about the product; the main reason I compost food is to make the trash less smelly on the weekly trip to the dump.

Commercial composting, which needs to kill off pathogens and create sellable product in reasonably short periods of time, have to be more systematic and intelligent about it. I didn't realize how systemetic they had gotten until I read a Free-Press article about a new high-tech composting facility in Vermont - it's indoors, not outdoor, and the main problem so far is keeping thepiles from getting *too* hot, which kills beneficial bacteria.

Read the article here.

August 2, 2011

Ig Nobel tickets go on sale today! Be there, or be non-Ig-ish

Tickets for the Twenty-First 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony go on sale today at noon. Unlike previous years, all the tickets will go on sale at once, so get your early.If you've never attended an Ig ceremony, you have missed out on a unique cultural institution. If Harpo Marx, Laurel and Hardy, and the Three Stooges on a non-violent day got together and planned a science fair, and invited a handful of real Nobel laureates to play along, it would look sort of like this.

The Harvard Box Office handles all ticket sales: https://www.boxoffice.harvard.edu

(They are non-cheap: $65, $45. $35, depending on where you are in the auditorium; students $40, $30. But you get what you pay for.)

The ceremony will happen at the usual place (opulent Sanders Theater at Harvard). This year's theme: Chemistry. It's on Thursday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 p.m. (Marc Abrahams, Head Ig, sent out a note saying "we are aware this coincides with the Rosh Hashanah holiday. Various calendar constraints collided this year.")

For details: http://improbable.com/ig/2011/

When water chestnuts invade a river, they *really* invade it

My Telegraph column this week (read it here) includes a video by staff photographer Don Himsel of canoing past a large mat of water chestnuts on the Nashua River. It's worth checking

out.

These water chestnuts (not the edible kind, alas) are one of several aquatic invasive species bedeviling New Hampshire. They're not quite as god-awful as milfoil, but they blanket the surface with mats so thick you can't row through them, doing a number on other waterlife. It's even dangerous to fall out of the boat in a mat; each floating flower has long, strong fibers that connect them to the river bottom, and these can really tangle swimmers.

Strontium-90 found in 'edible portions' of fish near Vermont Yankee

Vermont's governor, who wants to shut down Vermont Yankee, said Tuesday that some strontium-90 has been found in "edible portions" of fish in the Connecticut River near the nuclear power plant. ~~More details are to be released Wednesday. Free-Press story here.~~

WEDNESDAY MORNING UPDATE: There was one finding "just above the lower limit of detection in one fish sample" and it's the first time the radioactive material has been found in an edible portion of any of the fish routinely sampled near the plant, said the Vt. Health Department. But the level is low enough that the state issued no warnings against eating fish from the Connecticut River. Longer Free-Press story here.

WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON UPDATE: New Hampshire Health and Human Services hasn't heard any mroe details about the report, which concerns a fish caught in 2010. NH says it hasn't detected the radiation near the plant in recent months.

August 3, 2011

Goofy calendar number "holiday" du jour: Wi-Fi Day (8.02.11)

Yesterday was August 2, 2011, which means it was Wi-Fi Day: 8.02.11

I've gotten pretty tired of those unusual calendar/number days - Pi Day, 11/11/11, etc.etc. - but this one is clever.

August 4, 2011

Automated fraud detection worked for our credit card

We got a machine-voice call last night from Discover Card, checking on recent purchases made on my wife's credit card. It listed through a couple and sure enough: $900+ had been spent at walmart.com yesterday using the card, but not by us. My wife talked to a human; they yanked the purchase and issued her a new card.

I don't know what algorithm they used to flag that purchase - the card is used largely for buying groceries and gas, so it stood out - but well done to its programmers.

We have no idea how the card's number got swiped; the card itself hasn't been lost. Maybe it was part of one of those thefts of customer info which have been so endemic lately.

NorthernPass hydropower line delayed at least a year

The much-debated Northern Pass power line, designed to bring 1,200 megawatts of hydropower down from Quebec to New England, has pushed back its earliest turn-on date from 2015 to 2016. The dealy is related to difficulty in finding a route for the northernmost 40 miles which, unlike most of the rest of the 140-mile project, would require a new right-of-way to be cut through forestland.

Here's the Union-Leader story, which is largely taken from the announcement on the

August 5, 2011

Farmers markets create thousands of jobs, says UCS

I love the "localvore" movement - the push for people to grow, buy and eat more food that's grown in their area - even though I realize its limitations. Local food will never create a huge chunk of modern society's calorie input, at least not in the crowded, only-so-so-for-agriculture Northeast. But it can make a difference, it provides a dose of healthy food, it re-connects us with the environment and provides a financial incentive to create something other than plain woodlands or endless buildings.

And here's another benefit: It makes a lot of work for people. (You can't outsource killing squash bugs or stipping old, dead canes from the raspberry patch.)Â The Union of Concerned Scientists says in a new report that farmers markets have grown 20 times over four decades and has the potential to be a major job creator, although out financial and regulatory policies have been created to help big agriculture, which holds things back.

Here's the report, which is more regulatory than scientific.

A good example of why rankings done by algorithm are suspect

Boston-area media guy Dan Kenney has a great item today in reactino to Forbes trashing Northeastern University in Boston in its annual ranking of colleges. Forbes doesn't visit all umpty-hundred schools in the country; it just compiles various measurements and churns them through a simple algorithm so it can put out a list and get attention.

Why did Northeastern do badly? Because it stunk on the "four-year graduation rate" - zero percent! Egad!

The problem, as locqals know, is that Northeastern's unusual coop-learning program means that it's a five-year school. You're not allowed to graduate in four years.

D'oh!

Here's the item.

Obsolete Technology: Dolphin head oil for clocks

Back when I was taking a correspondence course in camera repair, part of the tools provided was a small bottle of camera and clock special oil. It's still in the original box along with a sheet describing the contents and other products. Here are the most interesting paragraphs of the sheet:

EZRA KELLEY AND WILLIAM NYE

Early in the nineteenth century, while experimenting with various fatty oils for use in clocks and chronometers, Ezra Kelley (1798-1895) a New Bedford clockmaker, came by chance upon a byproduct of some now forgotten whaling voyage, the head oil from a dolphin caught for food or sport. A triglyceride like all fats, this oil was unique in its low temperature properties and in its stability against oxidation or gumming. Kelley's experiments with this oil produced a startling improvement in clock lubrication; and by the latter half of the 1800's, the use of dolphin head or porpoise jaw oil for timepiece lubrication had virturally become standard, not only in the United States but through Europe as well.

SOURCES OF THE DOLPHIN OILS

Most of the smaller toothed whales, including dolphins and porpoises, have small quantities of oil in cavities in the head, especially in the brain "melon" and in the glands of the jaw hinges. . .

At one time Nye depended for a supply on strandings along the coasts of Massachusetts Bay, Buzzards Bay and on Cape Cod. During the early decades of this century the company operated an unusual "porpoise fishery" on the Hatteras Banks of North Carolina. There the animals were caught in huge seines which were dragged through the surf to shore. Today, William F. Nye, Inc., obtains blackfish head oil produced as a byproduct of larger commercial whale-harvesting enterprises in Canada and the West Indies. The oil is intensively refined and purified at the company plant in Fairhaven, MA.

This was printed in the 1960's. The company also handles synthetic oils,which have replaced traditional sources.

August 8, 2011

Testing an underwater "windmill" (yes, another one)

Getting hydropower from the tides or underwater river flows (as compared to putting up a dam) seems obvious and straightforward to us laymen. The water is moving naturally and carries much more energy that moving air, so let's use it to spin some turbine blades - voila! electricity.

However, as the paucity of such systems shows, it's hard to build machinery that will stand up to the pounding of moving water, particularly seawater, is tough. Doing it in a way that doesn't interfere with ecosystems that depend on the moving water is even tougher.

As a result, while I've posted to lots of stories over the years about tests of tidal power or run-of-the-river underwater turbines, nobody's done much with such "hydrokinetic" power. But they're still trying: Free Flow Power of Boston is testing 6,000-pound, 10-foot-tall turbines, which look like jet engines, on the floor of the Mississippi River in a whole bunch of locations: Globe story here.

Finding a shark in the woods, 50 miles from the ocean

I was going to link important but dull stories about underwater turbines or concrete science, but this one is more fun: In Milton, New Hampshire, near the Maine border about 50 miles from the ocean, people found a dead, six-foot blue shark discarded in the woods. Here's the story from the Union-Leader.

The assumption is that a fisherman dumped it on the way home because he/she didn't have an ocean-fishing license. The best part of the story is the fact that they left the corpse there: "We're just letting nature take its course."

(Writing this past has left Loudon Wainwright III's "Dead Skunk" in my head â¦ for better or worse.)

Department of Innovation logo (check the gears!)

If you're going to draw gears, don't draw 3 interlocking ones

Smithsonian.com has launched a new blog called Department of Innovation to track "all things innovative, not just in science and technology but how we live, how we learn, and how we entertain ourselves."

The logo of this cool new enterprise is shown here. You don't have to be a mechanical engineer to notice something a little wrong with the gear arrangement: In this configuration, none of them can move. One poster to the blog suggested that they might stand for the president, Congress and the Senate.

Hey, at least they didn't try to put any spin on it. Hahahahaha - get it???

(Tip of the hat to FIRST robotics pal-turned-college engineering student Tom King)

Nanocomp's carbon nanotube material used in NASA's Jupiter mission

Concord N.H.-based Nanocomp weaves together carbon nanotubes into yarn and fabric that conducts electricity and has interesting thermal properties but which, most importantly, is very light. Their target customer is the aerospace industry, where a gram saved is a dollar (or maybe $1,000) saved.

You can't more aerospace-y than Juno, NASA's just-launched mission to Juptier. So it's understandable that Nanocomp is proud that contractor Lockheed-Martin used Nanocomp's material, calle EMShield, in the fabrication of the craft a good way to block electrostatic discharge that can happen from as spacecraft pass through charges particles in space. From the press release: "Lockheed was interested in implementing an alternative ESD solution to traditional aluminum foil that is typically bonded to the surface of composites. By adding EMSHIELD CNT sheet layers during fabrication of the composite, they were able to integrate ESD protection directly onto the structure, making the composite a multifunctional element of the spacecraft." (Read the whole release here )

August 9, 2011

Visiting Nashua's unique triangular manhole covers

Nashua is slowly replacing its unique triangular manholes with round ones, because the triangles aren't big enough to meet modern safety standards. (The big problem: You can't get down them wearing breathing apparatus, if there's a gas problem below.) Nobody makes new ones, so the city is switching to the national standard. They still have a few hundred triangles to replace, though, so they won't disappear immediately.

I love those triangular covers, because they're unique so far as I can tell*, and just plain cool. For example, they point in the direction that the water is supposed to flow beneath them, providing a bit of information to sewer workers. They also rattle less when cars pass over them, compared to round ones.

I'm going to visit one of the replacement jobs this morning. Sometimes my job is excellent.

*A development in San Francisco has triangular covers to its water valves, as shown in this photo, but that's not quite the same thing. They are extra cool, however, in that the cover is a Reuleaux triangle, a curve of constant width - meaning the cover can't fall down through its own hole.

If you love manhole covers, by the way, Drainspotting is the site for you.

Cape Cod's "arm" is slowly rotating, and climate change is speeding it up

The Cape Code Times has a fine article about what erosion is doing to Cape Code's shape, and how the increase in strong storms and rise in sea level associated with a warming planet is accelerating that erosion. You can read the whole story, with an excellent illustration, here. From the story:

For the past 15,000 years, Georges Bank has served as a protective barrier for Cape Cod, blocking large ocean waves coming from the southeast. Now, the water over Georges Bank is deep enough to allow those waves to make landfall. That's accelerating erosion at southerly beaches, pushing more sand northward and slowing erosion at beaches up the coast. "Basically it means that Cape Cod is rotating clockwise about half a degree per millennium," said Adams.

Eventually, the "fist" that holds Provincetown is going to become an island.

August 10, 2011

Nashua Telegraph photo by Don Himsel - Triangular manhole cover atop a circulat cover that is replacing it. BPW is Board of Public Works.

Triangular manhole covers vs. circular manhole covers - size matters

The above photo by Don Himsel, taken during our visit to a DPW work site yesterday, show why Nashua is getting rid of its unique-in-the-world (so far as I can tell) triangular manhole covers: They're too small for today's workers wearing various safety equipment.

The triangles are 25.5 inches at the widest point (top to midpoint of opposite side), the circles are 31.5 inches in diameter. So the circle is roughly twice the area of the triangle; there's a bit of lip overlap that complicates the calculation, hence my fudging.

I wouldn't want to squeeze through that triangle-sized hole carrying a gas monitor (sewer gas buildup can be quick and deadly) or a harness, which allows me to be pulled out if necessary.

Like bird-watchers, except they watch butterlies

My Telegraph column this week is about the (to me) obscure pasttime of butterfly-watching, which is exactly like bird-watching (life lists, field guides, trips to special places to see special species at special times) except you don't have to get up as early, because butterflies only come out when it's sunny.

Read about it here.

After the column came out, I was reminded by readers about the New Hampshire Dragonfly Survey, which has volunteers charging through bogs and fields, looking for the one flying insect that is even cooler than butterflies. It started in 2007 and wraps up this year.

The new Department of Innovation logo, with some pulled-apart gears

Those gears on the Innovation Blog logo aren't interlocked any more!

Smithsonian.com has fixed the logo of its new blog called Department of Innovation, which I (and many others) ridiculed. The graphics designer pulling two of the gears apart so the triad is no longer an immovable, interlocking mess. The blog page includes this rather gritted-teeth editor's note: Thank you to everyone for your comments about our logo. We have since shifted the gears and switched in a new logo. (I bet that "thank you" isn't exactly what the editor was thinking.)

One Smithsonian commenter notes, by the way, that the spacing of teeth on the lower gear makes it appear that it won't mesh properly with the big gear, so maybe the logo isn't out of the woods yet.

The best comment on the Smithsonian site is the person who pointed out (tongue in cheek, I hope), that we all leapt to the assumption that the gears are in the same plane! "Think outside the box" he/she cried.

Photo by Chris Malloy The Google Street View car on Broad Street in Nashua on Aug. 20, 2011.

Google Street View car spotted in Nashua

Google has updated its street view of Nashua at least three times since it first came through in summer 2007, when it snagged a shot of Telegraph chief photographer Don Himself covering an event at City Hall. His 15 minutes of Google fame has long since been superseded, though.

They're updating it again, judging from the Google Street View car, spotted by Nashua resident Chris Malloy on Wednesday on Broad Street.

No word from the close-mouthed Google about how long before these pictures show up online.

(Back in 2008, it was still news when our Street View view changed, as this GraniteGeek post - marveling at the fact that a crowd has "disappeared" from downtown - demonstrates.)

August 11, 2011

Terrorists send bombs to nano-technology professors in Mexico

Concern about "gray goo" or something like it has led some terrorists to send mail bombs to a couple of Mexican professors working in nano-tech. Miami Herald story here. From the story: "The ITS is a movement that, in accordance with its ideals, opposes any development of neo- or nanotechnology anywhere in the world, and they are linked to attacks in several different countries of Europe, including Spain and France."

The bomb was desdcribed as "rudimentary" - one advantage of being targeted by Luddites, I guess - although one professor was slightly injured.

I don't suppose UNH's Center for High-Rate Nanomanufacturing has much to worry about. Deleted funding is probably more of an issue.

Photo by Boston University Ultra-Ex project

Boston's weekly carbon-emissions pattern: Weekends are quiet

This picture does not show a huge robotic hand controlled by aliens seeking to steal Earth women, although that's what it looks like: It shows part of the apparatus used at Boston University to make detailed measurements of carbon dioxide in the city. In geek-speak, it's part of "an NSF funded research project investigating the space-time variation in Metropolitan Boston's carbon metabolism."

The project is called Ultra-Ex, and is one of a bunch of such research programs getting data to make decisions about how to make modern cities more sustainable in terms of energy use, water use, pollution and such issue.

I learned of it from this Green blog item on the NY Times site, which talked about the site's discovery of a "weekend effect," a clear drop-off in the amount of carbon dioxide entering the city's atmosphere on Saturdays and Sundays.

In the meantime, though, I'm waiting for the Giant Claw From Aldebaran to seize the top four stories of the Pru Tower.

August 12, 2011

Wind power is a problem on hot, still days, so pay people to use less

From a NY Times story about power companies struggling with peak demand this summer:

Peak supply is also becoming a vexing problem because so much of the generating capacity added around the country lately is wind power, which is almost useless on the hot, still days when air-conditioning drives up demand.

PJM, which once stood for Pennsylvania, Jersey and Maryland, factors in such variability, counting a 100-megawatt wind farm as being worth only 13 megawatts on a peak summer day, for example. While over the course of a year the wind machines can contribute mightily to kilowatt hours produced, they do much of their production on windy winter nights, according to experts at PJM and other grid organizations.

In summer, utility planners have increasingly turned to a tool known as demand response, in which big customers sign up to have some of their power switched off in exchange for cash payments or cheaper rates. It is somewhat like an airline passenger's volunteering to be "bumped" in exchange for a free ticket. Companies recruit consumers willing to have their consumption electronically throttled.

New England was a leader in demand response, and currently has enough signed up to theoretically exceed the output of Seabrook Station nuclear plant.

NY Times story here.

New England's first Level 4 biohazard lab still on hold

Boston University has a building that it wants to use as a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory, to study pathogens that cause fatal disease in humans for which treatment is not available There are six such labs in the continent, none closer than Maryland. The building was completed in 2008 but hasn't been used because of neighborhood opposition. Folks get a little nervous when ebola moves in next door.

The Globe reports that BU is going to open part of the buildilng as a Level 2 laboratory, which handles less dangerous pathogens. Their first research will be on the bacteria that cause tuberculosis. They still hope to open the Level 4 portion: see the BU FAQ here.

Level 4 labs have all sorts of safety precautions when entering or leving through muliple airlocks, including ultraviolet light rooms. They also decontaminate air and water service.

Story is here.

August 13, 2011

Handling Hyphens

My wife just had a routine procedure at St Joseph's in Nashua.

The checking procedure went smoothly until they asked for her full name. She uses her maiden name and my last name seperated by a hyphen. No, she can't do that. The computer system can't deal with a hyphenated name.

That's pretty strange to me. After all, more women and some children have this as part of their legal name. Questioning the receptionist didn't reveal any reason beyond "We can't do that".

My sister-in-law works in a hospital in Maine so I asked her the question. She made a couple of calls to St Joseph's. She was told that is was a compatibility problem between two computer systems, the checkin system and the billing system. I would think that in this day and age that such an obvious issue could be easily solved.

Of course, I'm not the one who has to fix the problem.

August 14, 2011

Using a Vermont wasp to see if tree-destroying ash borers have arrived

The Cerceris wasp, a wide-ranging predator, carries the bugs that it catches back to its nest, which is a hole in the ground. If you spook it at the right time, it will drop the prety outside the nest. Emerald ash borers, the invasive insect that is destroying ash trees by the millions as it slowly makes it way here, is among the things it likes to eat.

These three traits combined mean that Cerceris wasps can act as a sort of scout, that will help us see if the borers have arrived here. Spook lots of wasps near a nesting site, then see what prey was abandoned nearby - clever. The Burlington Free-Press has a story, with some good photos, here.

You've probably seen emerald ash borer traps hanging in trees, also designed to spot early arrivals. They're weird triangular things, purple-colored and baited with phermone to attracted the bugs. From Univeristy of Maryland: "It's made out of thin, corrugated, purple plastic that has been coated with non-toxic glue on all three sides. The purple prisms are about 24 inches long and hang vertically in an ash tree or are secured to the trunk of a tree. To increase the attractiveness of the trap to the beetles, it is baited with a lure (Manuka oil). Scientists found that buprestids (the insect family to which EAB belongs) in general are more attracted to red and purple hues compared to other colors. Researchers initiated a study using a variety of red and purple traps to determine which trap attracted the most beetles; the purple trap achieved the best results."

August 16, 2011

Chain Letters

When I was a kid, chain letters were very common. They usually came with promises of bad luck, examples enclosed of people who broke the chain suffering loss or even death. If you responded, sending stamps or a dollar bill to the person at the top of the list, you were guaranteed thousands of dollars return on your small investment. All you had to do was to make five to ten copies of the letter and then send them out to friends who would pass on more copies to ten more unique people. How could it possibly fail?

Obviously, the math doesn't work. There aren't an infinite number of suckers in the world willing to throw their money in the ring. The post office has long ago determined that these schemes are illegal.Â There is usually some disclaimer in the letter that the contents were not illegal, that there was room for interpretation and anyway, how could something that made so much easy money for good people be wrong?

Growing up, we had neighbors up the street who were very superstitious. Putting up a calendar too early, a broken mirror, ignoring a chain letter were all grounds for serious bad luck. When one of these came in, copies were made and sent out. Did any of these ever pay off? Of course not. Even though the cards were parsed out and read every day and chain letters sent out their luck never seemed to change.

Now on to Facebook. I've noticed quite a few 'chain letters' on Facebook lately. They usually have some political or comic or tragic theme along with a request to send the link along to your friends. The internet has been clogged with these for years, usually sent by people with a new computer and email account. They've found the joy of on line funny stories, photos and videos. They simply have to pass on the joy to everyone on their email list.Â I've more than once responded harshly to distant friends, especially when on the road with a slow connection. The facebook distribution is a little more disturbing. These are from people that I've specifically chosen to be friends. I have a small list, those relatives or people that I feel a connection to.Â There have been some mistakes but I don't feel strongly enough toÂ defriend just yet. Still, when I see the list of messages that read "You simply must read this and pass it on", my inclination to be polite gets strained.

August 17, 2011

Magnetic Paint

The Mont Vernon Library wanted to mount a metal panel on a corner post so that they could display notices easily. We had just seen a DIY TV program on using magnetic paint to make a quick and easy board for a kids room.

My wife decided to give it a try, purchasing a quart at Milford Paint. It worked very well. We used 1/2â³ plywood as the base since we wanted some structural strength. I could be painted on an existing wall instead. It took the recommended three coats to build up enough base thickness. Our librarian uses regular magnets to hold the postings and works much better than pushpins.

I don't have the can since we used it all, so don't have the manufacturer but it should be easy to find if someone wants to try this.

Earle RichÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Mont Vernon, NH

August 19, 2011

Lobstering

My grandfather and I had a great arrangement. I would row and he would tell stories about his life and the way things were when he was growing up. I heard about my great-grandfather who lived during the civil war. I heard stories about fishing and whaling and the steamboats that traversed the Maine coast. Some of these exciting stories were even true. I heard some of the same tales from the old men in town while getting a haircut in Red's Barbershop in town. It really connected me to history.

Later, when I went out with my father in a much better boat, it wasn't the same. Dad wasn't a talker. We would do the whole trip out and back with just a few necessary words exchanged. Still, those early mornings on Penobscot Bay, especially when there was no wind, the bay like a mirror made for some of my best memories. I wish I had then the same photo equipment I have now.

We used a state issued brass gauge to measure from the eye socket to the end of the carapace. Too large or too small meant we had to throw it back. If we found a "seed" lobster, one with eggs tucked under that tail, we threw that one back after cutting a notch in the tail fin. All this was done to ensure the healthy population. Historically, these conservation measures have been very successful. Studies have suggested that the bait we used has fed lobsters during their growth period to adulthood. I know that we went through a few barrels of sardine heads and tails to stuff our bait bags. That was one of my jobs, reaching down into the barrel of bait stored over the winter, filling the net bag and cinching up the drawstring. We would tie this on a peg inside the trap, attracting crabs, sea urchins, snails and the occasional lobster. It was smelly work, but I never gave it a thought. It was just the way it was.

We were small time operators, doing it mostly as an expensive hobby and loving the lifestyle. The big time lobstermen, those with hundreds of traps resented us. Sometimes we would find our traps surrounded by their traps. It's a wonder that any lobster escaped but there always seemed to be more. The Maine coast had a great die off of eel grass and the loss of habitat caused a drop in fish and lobsters for a while, but they came back, just the same as before.

I'm sure the economics seldom came out positive. Still, at 35 cents a pound, it paid for the gas, maintained the boat with just a little left over. It's a tough life and I'm not sorry to be out of it. Once I escaped Maine and saw the world, I could never go back.

Earle RichÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Happy in Mont Vernon, NH

August 21, 2011

Boston has two - two! - professional chess teams. Seriously.

My Telegraph column last week was about the U.S. Chess League, the little-known professional chess league, which has two franchises in the Boston area: the Boston Blitz and the New England Nor'easters. The league plays four-on-four tournaments over the Internet Chess Club, and you can pay to watch. It has top-level grandmaster talent, including Larry Christiansen of the Boston Blitz and the country's top-rated player, Hikaru Nakamura, but most of the players get a few hundred dollar stipend, at most.

The most interesting thing to the outsider is that the teams can have average ratings of no more than 2400 (senior master level, well below grandmaster) and so you can't just load up on superstars; you've got to balance the roster. That's why the Nor'easters won the championship in their first year - they had a good mix of skill levels.

High-level chess is an insular world and the league is pretty publicity-shy, or more accurately just doesn't t care about publicity. - I had great trouble finding anybody to contact so I could do the story. Even the league's Web site is rinky-dink.

This wasn't really a surprise. I played a little in high school and college, when Bobby Fischer's shadow still covered everything. My USCF rating never got above about 1200, which isn't even advanced beginner, but even I could see then that chess didn't care two hoots about the rest of the universe.

Gathering acres of water chestnuts with a floating lawn mower

They've started "harvesting" invasive water chestnuts on the Nashua River. - the Telegraph has a story, with photos and a great video showing how the machine works. It's really a gigantic law mower, except it uses cross-cut rather than rotary blades.

Fun!

August 22, 2011

Triangular manhole covers in Nashua - geometry underfoot!

I have a story in the Sunday Telegraph about Nashua's unique (so far as I can tell) triangular manhole covers, which are slowly being replaced because they're not big enough to meet modern safety requirements. It's even got a video - a video of manhole covers! you don't see that every day - so check it out.

Check out the video here.

Upcoming Science Cafe on digital privacy - is it possible? is it even desirable?

Next month's Science Cafe New Hampshire is about vaccines, and one of the panelists is Jose Montero, the state epidemiologist and a cool guy. It should be lively: Wednesday, sept. 21 at 7:30 at The Barley House restaurant in downtown Concord. It's free, although you have to buy your own food and drink.

Geeks of a certain stripe may be more interested in the October 19 cafe, which will concern digital privacy - whether it's possible, how it can be done, whether it's even desirable. SCNH co-founder Dan Marcek just lined up the first panelist: Joe Pato of HP Labs.

November's cafe will be about biomass power - the promise and realities of burning wood for electricity and/or heat. We're taking December off, and January's cafe will be about the math, science and sociology of polls and polling.

When lightning just misses you and hits a tree, it isn't necessarily white

I recently got this email from a friend of mine, Pete King:

I hiked the Kinsman Ridge (south of Cannon Mt) yesterday with a couple of friends. We were rushing down to beat the lightning storm and were less than Â¼ mile from the Lonesome Lake hut in thick trees when lightning hit a tree or the ground about 30 - 50 feet from us. It was an amazing bright orange/red color, and it was like the woosh of a propane grill lighting after you left the gas on too long. There was of course the loud crack of the thunder, but I didn't hear the snap of electric discharge or smell ozone (but also didn't stick around for more than a second). It took a few seconds for our eyes to adjust from the flash but the two of us closest though the orange cylinder was around 10 feet in diameter.

(In a follow-up, Pete emailed: My reaction to the lightning earned me the trail name "Flame Runner")

Wow. As this FAQ from wvlightning.com says, "When lightning strikes an object or the ground, the lightning channel is often a deep red or orange color for its last ten feet or so above the ground or the target object. Lightning striking a tree will appear a bright, fiery orange/red color for the length of the channel traveling down the tree."

Small wind power for homes is a dud in N.H.

The state's rebate program for small-scale (under 5 kilowatt) alternate energy demonstrates one fact for New Hampshire homes seeking to generate their own electricity: Wind power is hardly a factor. In its three years, only 37 applications for wind power have been paid out to homeowners, less than one-tenth the number of solar applications. Almost no new applications are coming in.

Jonathan Osgood, energy conversation coordinator for the state Public Utilities Commission, said the decline is a reflection of the fact that small-scale wind power often doesn't work as well as people think it will.

"We've had comments from other state and from people who got early rebates, that they were discouraged. We're heard them say that neighbors with photovoltaic systems had more production in a day than they had in a month," he said.

The problem is twofold: Homeowners often overestimate how much wind blows in a given location, and wind power improves as the length of the blades of the turbine increase â that is, power is proportional to the swept area of rotating blades, in technical terms. This is why utilities continue to invest in very large wind turbines on windy mountain ridges even as homeowner systems languish.

Many designs have been floated over the years for turbines that will allegedly get more power out of the sort of light and variable winds encountered at many homes, but so far they have not reached great commercial success.

The above item was the "sidebar" to my story in Monday's Telegraph about the slow growth of at-home solar energy spurred by the state rebate program, which (surprise, surprise) is having some financial issues. I'm reprinting the sidebar here because it's easy to overlook them online, and I thought it was interesting. Read the whole story here.

August 23, 2011

Carrion beetle - wikipedia photo

Nature's gross-out beauty: Carrion beetles consume a dead bird in a day

I came back from vacation to find a dead black bird (maybe a blackbird, maybe a small crow, maybe something else) in my yard. It was very dead - no eyes, etc. - but was pulsating as if it was still alive, because dozens of large, black-and-yellow beetles were eating it. The scene was gross but fascinating; nature at its most unnervingly efficient.

The beetles are, not surprisingly, carrion beetles. (I didn't have a camera, so I've attached a wikipedia photo.) They crawled all over the bird in a frenzy, diving in and out of the body. The next morning, there's nothing but a stinky pile of bones and feathers.

The surprising thing is that I have never seen the beetles before, even though they are big - about the size of a nickle - and handsome. Obviously a lot are around all the time, or they couldn't have swarmed like they did.

There's a lot of life around that we don't know about.

Quintet of birch trees fallen at once

A birch-tree star: Five full-grown trees knocked down at once

This picture shows the scene at a campsite in the Adirondacks where my family stayed last week. Five full-grown birch trees, some a good foot across, had sprouted from one spot, and something knocked them all down at once, creating an almost perfect star. It had only happened a few days earlier, since the leaves were still green. No sign of lightning, so I assume it was just wind hitting the weakest of the five, and all the rest fell as a result

Maine lobsters are booming - are they booming too much?

The lobster population off the coast of Maine (and New Hampshire, of course, although we don't have much of a coast) are doing very well - so well, in fact, that lobstering now makes up an incredible 80 percent of Maine's seafood income, according to this NY Time story. however, this success creates financial vulnerability for the state when the lobster population crashes or declines. From the story:

Only a few decades ago, Dr. Steneck said, the Maine fishery included cod, hake, haddock, halibut and swordfish, many of them lobster predators. Intense fishing has just about eliminated most of them. Meanwhile, baited traps provide lobsters with a steady food supply. That has created an artificial ecosystem in which lobsters are "hyperdense." This kind of single-species crowding can be disastrous in the event of outbreaks like the parasite infestations and shell disease that severely reduced lobster yields in southern New England waters.

A report urges work to increase environmental diversity in the Gulf of Maine, even though it might diminish lobster numbers somewhat.

Maine lobstering is often held up as a model for ocean fisheries management - the population of crustaceans has staid healthy while the population of boat-manning humans staying financially healthy. This is partly because lobstering is easier to control, since you can carve up territory and assign it to different boats, unlike fishing in the open ocean where it's catch as catch can. In a way, lobstering is cattle ranching while fishing for, say, tuna, is deer hunting.

I didn't feel the earthquake, darn it

The 5.9 Richter-scale earthquake that hit near Richmond, Va. at 1:50 p.m. allegedly was felt as far north as southern N.H., but I didn't notice anything here in Hudson. Darn.

As of the moment, the USGS map of reports doesn't show many north of New Jersey, so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad: Here's the map.

August 24, 2011

EarthCope instrument network screen shot of "ripple" from Aug. 23 earthquake

Watch yesterday's earthquake "ripple" across the U.S. on a video

Seismometers from the EarthScope project Transportable Array measured the up-and-down motion of the ground from the magnitude 5.9 earthquake that occurred in Virginia on August 23, 2011. You can see the waves move across the country! Red is upward motion; blue down. The height of the wave was only 22 microns!

NH: No tritium found in Connecticut River

The New Hampshire Division of Public Health Services says water samples found no tritium in the Connecticut River near the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. ~~The tests were made in response to an announcement last week from Vermont about tritium having been found in edible portions of a fish, some time ago.~~ (Oops - I'm mixing up my radioactive elements. The fish had strontium-90)

The state has sampled 9 sites since a tritium leak was first found at Vermont Yankee last year. Vermont also sampled from "the point where the groundwater flows from the shoreline into the Connecticut River," said the department.

As I noted in an April story (read it here) N.H. has long tested for radiation in the air, water and plants and crustaceans throughout the southern part of the state to make sure nothing is oozing out of Vermont Yankee or Seabrook Station

NH Audubon Society: Comparison of bird population trends among nine NH habitats.

NH birds: 1/3 doing well, 1/3 so-so, 1/3 in trouble

New Hampshire Audubon has issued a citizien's version of its report on the state of New Hampshire birds, showing that (very roughly) 1/3 of the 186 species that breed in NH are in good shape, 1/3 are stable or lacking data, and 1/3 are declining, notably those who depend on shrubland and grassland. Aerial insectivores, including the phoebes that nest in my barn every year, are also declining, whereas fish-eating birds like osprey and bald eagles are booming. I wrote about the report in April, but the new guide is much easier to handle.

You can read or download the conservation guide here.

August 25, 2011

How to make extreme paper airplanes, in Concord

Aeronautical engineering major Adam Mistretta, an intern at the McAuliffe-Shepard Discovery Center, will host what sounds like an excellent Friday evening discussion: How to design your own experimental paper aircraft and helicopters.

It's part of the center's Super Stellar Friday series, kicking off at 7 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 26, with the usual admission rates ($9 adults). Directions are here.

August 26, 2011

Of hurricanes and toilet bowls

My Telegraph science column runs every Monday. I assume that on Monday, people will only be thinking of the hurricane as it hits here, so I would like to have a hurricane-related science column. All the real science about how they form and move and all that has been pretty well hashed out in news stories, though, which doesn't leave me much.

Except, of course, it's relationship to the vortex in your toilet bowl flush. That's always good â¦

Who says professional journalism has no role today?

Miss USA and teaching evolution in school - reality, and parody

Hurricane planning at the paper hasn't given me time to find local material today, but I do have time to (a) cringe and (b) laugh at the two videos linked below. One compiles answers from Miss USA candidates to the question "should evolution be taught in school" and the other is a parody version answering "should math be taught in school." You gotta love Miss Vermont in the second video.

Here's the link - via BoingBoing

The hurricane must be real: The White Mountain huts are shutting

The Appalachian Mountain Club is shutting down and evacuating its eight high huts in the White Mountains this weekend, because the National Forest Service will close the White Mountain National Forest and all of its trails and campgrounds as over 6 p.m. Saturday, because of fears about Hurricane Irene. Forest roads will be gated and all developed sites and backcountry shelters are being evacuated.

An AMC spokeswoman emailed me that nobody can remember the huts being evacuated, at least not for decades - which I think probably means never, because before that there wouldn't have been any way to get the word out.

Wow.

I've got to wonder about the various Appalachian Trial through-hikers that litter the Whites this time of year, huffing and puffing their way toward Mount Katahdin before fall hits. You just know a bunch of them are going to tough it out. Hopefully they'll just get really wet.

August 28, 2011

CoCoRaHS precipitation map for NH on Aug. 28

Precipitation volunteers make fascinating reading in a hurricane

I'm a volunteer precipitation-measurer for the Community Collaborative Rain/Hail/Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) run by the National Weather Service. The site (http://cocorahs.org) makes interesting reading today: One volunteer on the eastern shore of Maryland reported 11.34 inches of rain in a 24-hour period up through this morning. Wow!

I got 1.74 inches overnight, from 5 p.m. when it started until 7:30 this morning. The heaviest is yet to come.

August 29, 2011

Over the weekend, NOAA's gauge at the mouth of the Souhegan was predicting a crest of 9 feet by this morning - but it's barely 6 feet.

No power at home, but Irene was generally a washout here

I still don't have power at home ()along with about 85,000 PSNH customers in the state), but generally Irene didn't do much damage hereabouts. I got about 3.5 inches of rain total, which is hardly record-setting, and only a few medium-sized branches fell.

(No power is easier in August than during an ice storm, when freezing pipes is a worry. My biggest problem is that I'm on a well, so I have no water. Hauling buckets of water from the rain barrel to flush the toilet gets old fast.)

As a sign of how the rain didn't hit, the NOAA's automated gauge at the mouth of the Souhegan River had been predicting a crest of 9 feet today - but the reality (as shown in the screen shot at left) is less than six feet.

The storm shifted west and really nailed Vermont, however.

Back to our regularly scheduled disasters: Tree-eating invasive bugs

Hurricane Irene didn't do as much damage as feared hereabouts, so we can go back to worrying about other destructive threats - like tree-eating invasive beetles. Two cases:

A detailed study in Worcester, Mass., has found that Asian longhorned beetle thrives in thicker woodlands than previously thought, making it more likely that it can spread through the forests of New England. Globe story here.

A Cornell University expert admits that we're unlikely to stop the emerald ash borer before it pretty much destroys all of the continent's ash trees, just as blight destroyed the American elm and the chestnut. "We need to start considering how we're going to preserve the genetics so we can perhaps bring these back in the future â¦. pursuing that Plan B: collecting seeds to study and plant at a time when the ash may be able to survive the invader." NPR story here.

'I Have a Dream' speech is covered by copyright

The weekend unveiling of the Martin Luther King memorial in DC was delayed by Hurricane Irene, as you've probably heard. Here's something you may not know: The King family owns rights to that speech, even though "a speech broadcast to a large audience on radio and television, and considered instrumental in historic political changes and ranked as the most important speech in 20th century American history, would seem to be a prime candidate for the public domain," as Slashdot puts it.

I'm a fan of copyright laws (as are most people who "create content" for a living) but this seems a little excessive.

Check out the article here.

August 30, 2011

River testing this morning might be a little dicey, thanks to the storm

Every other Tuesday I, along with a couple dozen other volunteers, collect water samples to test local rivers for bacteria and oxygen count. I may have to bail out, so to speak, this morning: The rivers rose alot Monday due to the water from Irene, and according to a nearby hydraulic gauge the flow is almost 900 cubic feet/second, which is about four times what it was last time and more than 20 times the usual flow for this time of year (when it's usually very low).

The banks a little steep where I usually go â¦ I might have to try to find another spot.

Here's the page where we record results, on the Souhegan, Merrimack and Nashua rivers.

Air conditioning & Texas drought = twice New England's electricity usage

Air conditioning has become the biggest power draw in the U.S., overall; even here in New England, the peak usage occurs in summer, not winter (partly because we've switched from electric heat to oil).

Down in Texas they are suffering through a drought and heat wave of near-biblical proportions, with triple digits for months on end. It also has a separate electric grid, as a result of historical accidents. Yesterday, the Texas grid used a staggering 65,443 megawatts of electricity.

How staggering is that? The total capacity of all electricity generation in the six New England states is a bit under 30,000 megawatts (ISO-New England, which runs the grid, also has 1,235 MW of imports on call and 1.260 MW of "demand response" in which big users like companies agree to cut back on hot days). New England's all-time peak usage was Aug. 2, 2006, when it hit 28,130 MW. (1 MW is roughly enough to power 1,000 homes).

So Texas is well over twice our maximum and is likely to continue there for many days as 100-plus-degree temperatures continue.

As for me, I was out on the Souhegan River this morning, gathering water samples in crisp, gorgeous 60 degree weather. (The post-Irene river was so high that for the first time in five years of sampling, I couldn't wade out into it, but stayed next to the bank.)

Become a Sunbelt snowbird when I retire? I don't think so â¦

Why aren't more power lines buried? It's expensive, and no panacea

The Concord Monitor has a good article today, as power gets restored to the region, about why more power lines aren't buried, kept away from falling trees. Here's the story. Here are some money quotes:

After the ice storm in 2008, when thousands of New Hampshire residents were without power for a week or more, the state Public Utilities Commission hired a Colorado engineering firm to study the prospect of burying the state's power lines. The firm, NEI Electric, concluded it would take 40 years and cost $40 billion to bury the state's existing power lines.

Underground lines are less vulnerable to high winds, falling trees, ice and snow, NEI Electric said, but perhaps more susceptible to other hazards. Those include flooding, lightning, rodent and human damage to the ground, and earthquakes.

The consulting firm and the Public Utilities Commission decided the advantages of burying lines did not outweigh the costs, which have been estimated to be 10 times higher than stringing lines overhead.

A self-driving farm tractor from a Massachusetts firm

Google might want to make self-driving cars, but a self-driving farm tractor should be a lot easier. (No worries about other drivers!) In Cambridge, Mass., Jaybridge Robotics has done that with a John Deere. The company claims " The driverless system is fully controlled by advanced software and is capable of performing a complete workflow during the harvest process. This includes locating a moving harvester in the field, synchronizing with it, collecting its grain and delivering that grain to trucks near the field for transportation."

You can see video at the company Web site, linked above.

(Spotted via this Globe article.)

August 31, 2011

Utility: A 'smart grid' could reduce storm outages

A two-way power grid that notifies utilities of outages and power anomalies - part of the "smart grid" proposal that we hear so much about - could reduce outages due to storms, or at least reduce the amount of time needed to fix outages. So says ComEd, a Chicago-area utility, as reported in this Daily Herald story.

From the story:

ComEd would have known customers were out of power without them having to call us. Technology would have pinpointed outages allowing us to dispatch crews more quickly to restore service. Digital automation would have rerouted power or corrected a problem before an outage occurs meaning fewer customers would have seen outages, and thousands of customers may have never experienced an outage. With the June 21 storm, we estimate that 100,000 customers would have never experienced an outage. With the July 11 storm, we estimate that approximately 175,000 customers would have never experienced an outage.

September 2011

Watch the animation here.

September 1, 2011

N.H. joins suit to stop online ads for drugs, sex

From the Union-Leader today:

Attorney General Michael Delaney and 46 other state attorneys general on Wednesday requested information about how the website Backpage.com attempts to remove advertising for sex trafficking, specifically advertisements that could involve minors.

The letter says the website is a popular destination for individuals seeking to exploit minors and points to more than 50 cases, in 22 states over three years, involving the trafficking or attempted trafficking of minors through Backpage.com.

Here's the U-L story.

The situation has been going on for a while. Last year a 14-year-old sued the site's parent company, saying that the site knowingly allowed a convicted pimp to buy ads soliciting sex. The suit was thrown out in December.

A screen shot of NASA's animation of Irene

Satellite video of Irene, start to finish, in 1:29

NASA has put up an animation (lots of photos put together in almost-video form) of satellite observations from August 21 through 29, showing Irene from birth in the Caribbean to death in eastern Canada. It takes 1:29, and shows the staggering size of the storm - no wonder it pulled so much moisture from the ocean that ended up being dumped inland.

The images are from the GOES-13 satellite, overlaid on a true-color MODIS map.

UFO festival this weekend, as 50th anniversary of the Hills' abduction nears

Sept. 19 will be the 50th anniversary of the alien abduction of Betty and Barney Hill while they were driving home through the White Mountains. This even launched the whole UFO abduction craze, which is why UNH has the Hills' papers and the state put up a historical marker at the spot.

You can get ready for the celebration this weekend in Exeter at the third annual UFO Festival. Here's a report from The Wire, a Seacoast weekly.

September 2, 2011

Electric cars can be home generators during blackouts

V2G is a TLA (three-letter acronym, although "letter" isn't quite right) standing for "vehicle-to-grid," in which an electric car sends power into the grid, instead of drawing it out. This isn't an original idea: As early as 2007 (see my post here, which includes the V2G initialism, I notice) people were doing this with a Prius.

Now several Japanese companies ramping up electric-car production want to make the system easier, developing and selling modules that will draw out DC power from car batteries and make it available to your home AC system. Mitsubishi may have one for sale in this country within a year, reports the NY Times.

Photo by Don Himsel: One of the drawings with the Civil War "machinery for navigating the air"

How much would you pay for paperwork about a Civil War steam-powered airplane?

RR Auctions, an online auction house in Amherst, has a bi-annual sale of stuff related to spaceflight and aviation. Most of it is cool but predicatble - old Apollo computers, a watch that went to the moon, a bolf from a Mercrucy spacecraft - but there's one incredibly awesome surprise: extensive correspondence by a guy who tried to develop a steam-powered airplane for the Confederacy during the Civil War. He called it "a simple arrangement of machinery for navigating the air for purposes of transportation and travel, but more particularly with a view to operations of war in the present crisis."

It sounds like a steampunk novel plot, but it's real. Here's a link to the brochure about the collection.

Included are letters from the Engineering Bureau of the War Department of the Confederate States of America that frowned on the whole thing, saying that he exaggerated the power output of engines and misstated the role of air resistance. But back in 1863, a half-century before the Wright Brothers' success, nobody really understood this stuff, so maybe he was right. He certainly didn't give up, eventually writing to Jefferson Davis and making drawings of what looks like a radial piston-powered engine.

Satellite transmitter-tagged osprey heads from NH to South America

A fledgling osprey carrying a satellite transmitter is heading from a nest in New Hampshire has started its long and perilous migration to South America. The young female osprey, named Saco, was equipped with the solar-powered, GPS-enabled satellite backpack when it was 6 weeks old at its nest at the Ayers Island Hydro Station in New Hampton in July. It was as part of a new project by the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center.

The new tracking project is led by Iain MacLeod, Executive Director of the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center in Holderness, NH. MacLeod has studied Ospreys for more than 30 years and has monitored the growing nesting population in the NH Lakes Region since 1997. "This project will allow us to track this bird continuously for up to three years as it migrates across the Equator, and is part of a larger New England-wide project spearheaded by Dr. Richard O. Bierregaard, a distinguished visiting research professor at the Department of Biology at the University of North Carolina," said MacLeod. "Bierregaard has been studying Ospreys on Martha's Vineyard for 42 years and holds extensive experience using this satellite tracking system. After 10 years, and more than 40 birds tagged (mostly on the Vineyard), his project is providing much-needed data revealing migrational differences among Ospreys and helping pin down where threats to the birds lie," added MacLeod.

Two chicks were tagged in July, but the younger male chick didn't survive its first flight attempts.

The osprey, sometimes called the "fish hawk", is the only bird of prey in the world to feed exclusively on live fish. Their large size , huge stick nests (often on man-made structures, including light towers, channel markers and even buildings) and widespread distribution have made them familiar to many people. Once decimated by DDT, ospreys have recovered significantly in the last three decades and have recolonized most of their pre-DDT haunts.

To find out more about this Osprey project and see updated maps of Saco's journey, visit http://www.nhnature.org and click on the Project OspreyTrack button.

The project is funded by PSNH, which owns the hydropower dam at the site: http://www.psnh.com/Environment/Osprey-Online.aspx.

September 7, 2011

Microwave oven made by Amana

My sister has a nice microwave oven made by Amana. It stopped working so I volunteered to either fix it or recover the magnets from the magnetron and other bits and pieces. The problem was that the secondary had opened on the transformer. I scavenged a couple of ovens from the dump and one of them had a transformer close in size to the failed one. After replacing, the oven is as good as new. That's the first one I've seen that the transformer has failed.

There isn't much to go bad in these. Once in a great while a diode fails but the usual problem is an accumulation of grease on the window that lets the energy into the food compartment. Too many cheese pizzas and not enough cleaning can start a smoky fire. The usual cure, (after throwing it out on the lawn) is to get a new one. Cleaning it up properly makes another oven for a college student or other needy person. I've only seen one or two out of a hundred or so fixed that have a bad control board. All in all, these appliances are very reliable and seem to last forever. Ours here at home is about 24 years old and is still running fine.

After stripping out the secondary, the transformer makes a nice 1+ kw transformer for a spot welder with a couple of secondary turns or, with more windings, any voltage you want. I have a bucket full of microswitches, so I don't collect those any more. The sheet metal goes to the metal pile at the dump. The control boards go into the electronics recycling box. Nothing goes to landfill.

The magnets from these are great. They are round doughnuts about three inches in diameter. They are strong enough to be useful but not strong enough to be dangerous. One unique application I do is to cover the truck cab with a tarp before a snow or ice storm. The tarp is held in place by a few of these magnets. I also use them to hold jigs in place on the table saw.

Earle RichÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Mont Vernon, NH

September 9, 2011

"Unusually wet or dry may become usual"

I just got back from a few days down south and am catching up â¦ but as yet another storm dumps yet more record rain on parts of the region, I thought I'd remind everybody of the excellent headline the Telegraph put on a column of mine back in May: "Unusually wet or dry may become usual."

The column did some rudimentary analysis of historic rainfall totals at the National Weather Service station in Concord. It found that the decade of the 2000s had by far the most "abnormal" years: "Between 2001 and 2010, eight of the 10 years had precipitation levels outside the normal range. That includes the wettest, second-wettest and third-wettest years on record, as well as the third-driest year on record."

The intriguing semi-English of automated comment spam

Like many blogs, I get waves of comment spam that is either generated by a poor language algorithm or an overworked Romanian whose only experience with English was listening to garbled BBC broadcasts. Here are a few delightfully scrambled sentences taken from recent spam:

My mate primary identified your blog site on the search engines and he or she alluded your site to my opinion.

I have read a few good stuff here

My spouse and i learn all of the dynamic manner you offer efficient suggestions through your website a

But the winner this month has to be this:

Because of looking out throughout the search engines and seeing thoughts which are not pleasant, I figured my life was well over. Being alive minus the answers to the issues you've resolved all through your entire report is a serious case, and the kind which may have badly affected my entire career if I hadn't come across your site

"Looking out throughout the search engines and seeing thoughts which are not pleasant" â¦ if that doesn't describe the Internet, I don't know what does.

September 10, 2011

Why aren't more power lines buried?

My Telegraph column this week asked why more power lines aren't buried, to get out of the way of ice storms, hurricanes and falling trees. The short answer: Buried lines also fail, from water, animals, shifting soil and errant construction crews, and do it more often than you think; also, they're much harder to fix than overhead lines, which almost negates the reliability advantage - but mostly, it just costs too much.

This is the product: Steripen

Here's an assessment of the 2008 ice storm power outage, with discussion of the topic in Appendix B.

The article has a number of comments at the bottom, many angry at me because they want PSNH to bury a portion of the controversial Northern Pass proposal, in the extreme North Country. In general, the discussion is pretty good.

September 12, 2011

Another newspaper-online business idea: Divide (the site) and profit (hopefully)

Although it's distressing to live inside it, the collapse of newspapers' century-old business model (journalism subsidized by advertising) has been interesting to watch, now that different papers are trying different ways to get people to pay for online news.

Most are doing a version of the Telegraph's plan: You can read a certain number of stories per month for free - a move designed to grab the occasional drive-by reader from Google - but after that you have to pay, or (even better!) subscribe to the print edition, which still makes the large majority of our shrinking income. The vast majority of the website content also appears in print.

The Boston Globe just announced a different idea: It's going to keep its long-running (since 1995) Boston.com site free, which will "include summaries and headlines of stories on BostonGlobe.com, but you must be a subscriber to read those stories in full. Boston.com is also in the process of adding two dozen new blogs, primarily related to business, consumers, and nightlife." But today it launched BostonGlobe.com, a $3.99/week site which "will combine the newspaper's print stories with breaking news on a site designed for customers who want premium content they can read on multiple devices, from computers to tablets to smartphones." Here's the announcement.

You can see BostonGlobe.com free for this month. I suspect the "multiple devices" aspect of the site which will draw viewers, as the Era Of The Personal Computer slowly draws to a close.

Dan Kennedy, a longtime Boston-area media-watcher, argues that the sites were set up this way, usting HTML5, partly to avoid paying Apple a chunk of subscription revenue: His column is here.

My last Netflix red envelope

LIke a lot of people who use Netflix, I am doing what Netflix wanted me to do when it jacked up its rates: Dropping the DVD option and going streaming-video-only (which we watch on TV via Roku). The last red envelope showed up in the mail today, about five years after we first subscribed.

I suppose this is a sort of minor cultural moment, like the start of cable TV or when video stores stopped renting videos, or when I dropped America Online. Or something.

It's yet another blow to the Post Office, if nothing else. Netflix made up as much as 5% of my incoming mail.

Dartmouth, UNH got $12 million-plus from National Science Foundation last year

Dartmouth and UNH are neck-and-neck in terms of National Science Foundation funding, according to an analysis for Mass High Tech. Dartmouth got $12.98 million, UNH got $12.26 million. They're the only two N.H. institutions in a list of the 30 places which got the most NSF money in 2010.

MIT and Woods, with about $75 million each, are virtually tied for the lead. Harvard, with $43 million, is next. Universities, not surprisingly, dominate, with a few research-oriented corporations sprinkled amidst them.

The whole list is here.

This is what sidescan sonar of the ocean floor looks like. Colored dots indicate different patterns of marine debris.

What do 1,570 derelict lobster traps look like on the ocean floor?

A 4-day sidescan sonar survey around the coastal waters of Portsmouth and the Isles of Shoals found 1,570 lobster traps appear to be derelict, shifting around on the ocean floor endangering wildlife. That's the conclusion of a study by various environmental groups, which includes this interesting observation:

While derelict gear is considered marine debris, it hard to determine what impacts it has on the environment, and marine life. In some cases, gear can even get so encrusted with marine life that it becomes an artificial habitat. "From an ecological standpoint, it is difficult to quantify what impact these derelict pots have on the marine habitat," added Ken La Valley, Associate Director, of NH Sea Grant. "When we retrieve the gear, an analysis will be conducted to identify their associations with vertebrate and invertebrate animals."

For more information, start here: http://cecf1.unh.edu/debris/

September 13, 2011

Luring tree-eating invasive bugs with sight, not smell

I have previously mentioned the triangular purple boxes seen hanging in some trees, which are lures for emerald ash borers, put out to detect the leading edge of infestations. The NY Times has a good article (read it here) today on how those traps, so different from most phermone-using insect traps, were developed.

Biologists examined the insect, which has relatively big eyes, and figured it was more visual than most. Then they had to decide on what color lured it, so they tried a bunch.

The deep purple, it turned out, was the beetles' antennas-down favorite. Mr. Mastro theorizes that the bugs link the color to the purplish hue that can be seen on the inner bark of ash trees. But no one knows for sure. With the color decided, the team had to settle on the right shape. Four-sided traps gave them the most surface area, but manufacturing three-sided prisms was far cheaper. Each one costs about $9.

To enhance the traps' ability to attract beetles, Mr. Mastro said a chemical lure was added. The most effective proved to be manuka oil, an extract from a tree that has been used by Maori tribesmen in New Zealand to treat certain illnesses. (Manuka is widely used in the West for aroma therapy.) Each lure packet contains a blend of manuka and other scents and costs $5.

September, 14, 2011

Steripen ... looks like magic, but it kills germs in water.

UV light water purifiers seem more like magic than technology

My daughter got one of those ultraviolet-light water purifiers for use in camping, to kill bacteria so you can drink water from streams and lakes. We tried it on a camping trip, and nobody got sick so I guess it worked.

But the darn thing feels more like magic than technology. You turn it on, making the end glow blue, stick it in your water bottle, then wiggle around for 20-30 seconds until the light goes off, indicating it has done its job. There is no visual or other sensory cue that it has done anything at all; you might as well be waving chicken feathers or placing it the bottle a magic pentagram drawn in the sand.

I guess I'm way behind the times, though: a little wikipedia-ing shows that the concept has been around a long time. The 1903 Nobel Prize for medicine concerned using UV against tuberculosis!

Even after your hearing decays, hearing protection makes sense

From Earle Rich: I've had tinnitus (ringing in the ears) for years. Fortunately, it has subsided so that only in quiet environments do I even notice it.

Back when I was a kid, my hearing loss was pretty severe due to blocked eustacheon tubes, frequent colds and adenoids that needed to be removed. After all that abuse, I have one ear that is way down in sensitivity and the other with mild loss. Once I got my hearing back, it was a long time before my brain was trained to ignore background noise. I couldn't reject the normal sounds of radios and people talking around me. I was experiencing sensory overload all the time. Now, that isn't a problem. My only issue now is that loud noises are literally painful. A child screeching, power tools, something falling, all these hurt!

As a result of getting functional hearing back, I'm very careful about exposure to loud sounds. I have three sets of hearing protection headsets in the shop, always within easy reach whenever I turn on a power tool. I never run the chain saw without earplugs or headsets. So, in my 70s, I can hear about as well as I could in after I achieved adulthood.

What really bugs me is when I see other people ignoring hearing protection. The usual excuse is, "My hearing is already poor, so what's the use?" What these people don't realize is that noise damage is accumulative: Loud sounds destroy those tiny hairs that allow the ear to recognize soft sounds. Once those sensors are damaged, they don't recover. Tinnitus is the almost inevitable result of abuse.

A recent article on www.physorg.com about new findings on tinnitus shows that the problem is being addressed in a couple of different ways. Drugs, only tested on animals but having serious side effects, may lead to new medical cures. A better way seems to be a method of retraining the brain so that damaged nerve cells can have lower sensitivity. Either way, it's good that tinnitus is being recognized as a serious medical problem.

The article is here: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-09-tinnitus-discovery-ways.html

The Ig Nobels are coming! The Ig Nobels are coming!

The Ig Nobels awards are coming (Thursday, Sept. 29, at Harvard as usual) and have a YouTube promo (a clever one, of course) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pwbX9q9cBc&.

The event is sold out, alas, but will be live webcast at http://www.youtube.com/improbableresearch and http://improbable.com/ig/2011/.

This will be the 21th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. Organized by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), in cooperation with several Harvard student groups, it features genuine Nobel laureates to hand prizes to the winners, including Dudley Herschbach (chemistry, 1986), Rich Roberts (physiology or medicine, 1993), Jack Szostak (physiology or medicine, 2009), Roy Glauber (physics, 2005), Eric Maskin (economics, 2007), Peter Diamond (economics, 2010) and Louis Ignarro (physiology or medicine, 1998). One of them will also be the prize in the Win-a-Date-with-a-Nobel-Laureate Contest.

Last year (2010) the honorees included: Italian scientists who demonstrated mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if they promoted people at random; New Zealand doctors who showed that people slip and fall less often on icy footpaths if they wear socks on the outside of their shoes; and a Chinese/British team who scientifically documented fellatio in fruit bats.

The theme of this year's ceremony is Chemistry. The night will begin with Tom Lehrer's classic song "The Elements" performed by Harvard Medical School professor Thomas Michel and Nobel laureate Rich Roberts. [Hear a recording of Tom Lehrer himself performing the song, at http://bit.ly/9NujcJ]

The ceremony will also include:

â¢ "Chemist in a Coffee Shop," a new mini-opera starring Maria Ferrante, Roberta Gilbert, Thomas Michel, and Daniel Rosenberg.

â¢ A tribute to Professor William Lipscomb, 1976 Nobel laureate in chemistry, who performed exuberantly in nearly all the previous Ig Nobel Prize ceremonies. He passed away recently at the age of 91.

â¢ THE 24/7 LECTURES, in which several of the world's top thinkers each explains his or her subject twice â first in 24 seconds, and then in 7 words.

September 16, 2011

A glimmer of hope for bats dying from white nose syndrome

A study of bats with white-nose syndrome in 2009 has produced a blimmer of hope. 30 brown-nosed bats, one of the two species being wiped out by the disease, caused as the result of a fungus, were given "supportive care", which basically meant they were kept warm and dry, for 70 days, and 25 of 26 showed "significant improvement" without the need of treatment, such as cleaning with distilled vinegar.

This is the first glimmer of hope that the fungal disease isn't going to exterminate cave-dwelling bats in the U.S. The report was published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases in July.

My wife, a veterinarian, liked the way they described that the bats were confirmed to be infected with G. descrucans, the wonderfully-named fungus, by the use of "a noninvasive fungal tape method." This, she explained to me, means they put Scotch tape on the bats, pulled it off, then examined the sticky side under a microscope. She does that herself to find various skin parasites and diseases.

Here's the abstract. The full article costs money.

Do you know who Bob Swanson is? (Think Edison, Jobs, Hewlett & Packard â¦)

In a gesture that is, depending on your point of view, cheezy or intriguing, a half-dozen "walk of fame" stars have been placed in a sidewalk on Main Street in Cambridge, Mass., honoring inventor/entrepreneurs. The Globe has a story.

There are six stars. I recognized Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mitch Kapor, and Bill Hewlett and David Packard, but I was stumped by Bob Swanson. Turns out he founded Genetech, which helped launch the whole biotech scene around Route 128, making him more than worthy of enshrinment.

Biotech has never really grabbed my interest, although I can't say why. It certainly has enough intellectual, business and ethical complications to keep any observer fascinated for a lifetime.

UNH to study gamma rays with a balloon called GRAPE (wonderful acronym)

By David Sims, UNH News Service:

Beginning Sunday, September 17, 2011 at NASA's launch facility in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, space scientists from the University of New Hampshire will attempt to send a balloon up to 130,000 feet with a one-ton instrument payload to measure gamma rays from the Crab Pulsar, the remains of a supernova explosion that lies 6,500 light years from Earth. The launch is highly dependent on weather and wind conditions, and the launch window closes at the end of next week.

The Gamma Ray Polarimeter Experiment (GRAPE), which was designed and built at the Space Science Center within the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS), is an effort to apply a new type of detector technology to the study of celestial gamma rays.

Specifically, the goal of the GRAPE project is to study the polarization of gamma rays from celestial sources. "Polarized" radiation vibrates in a preferred direction, and the extent of that polarization can provide clues to how the radiation was generated, in essence serving as a probe of the source.

Gamma rays, such as those emitted from the Crab Pulsar, are generally produced from the interactions of a highly accelerated beam of subatomic particles â massive ejections of high-energy particles that are thought to take the form of a narrow jet moving outward at nearly the speed of light.

"We think that an accelerated beam of particles is the source of the high-energy radiation from the Crab Pulsar, but the structure of that beam and the mechanism by which the radiation is generated is not entirely clear," says mission lead scientist Mark McConnell, a professor in the SSC and chair of the UNH department of physics.

Detecting gamma-ray polarization can provide astrophysicists with a better understanding of particle acceleration, a ubiquitous and important but poorly understood process that generates radiation and occurs throughout the universe â from Earth's magnetic field (magnetosphere) to pulsars and black holes.

The New Mexico-based flight, which could last as long as 40 hours, is not designed to reach the ultimate goal of the project â to study gamma-ray bursts. Achieving that will require a follow-up flight over Antarctica where the balloon, due to circumpolar winds that occur between December-January, would circle the pole for 30 to 40 days.

Says McConnell, "To study the gamma-ray burst phenomena we need much more time because they occur randomly in the sky at a rate of about once per day and last at most a couple of minutes. So a long flight will be required to measure a number of bursts."

However, McConnell notes, a successful, short-duration demonstration flight should provide the best measurements of the polarization of gamma rays emanating from the Crab Pulsar to date because of the sophistication of the instrumentation â the "polarimeter" detectors developed at UNH â capable of making the difficult measurement. "We should be doing some very useful science on the Crab Pulsar during this flight and we only need 24 hours to do that," he says.

The concept of GRAPE has been developed at the SSC over the last 15 years and in 2007 the first small-scale demonstration balloon flight took place using a single polarimeter to prove the concept. In its current incarnation, GRAPE uses 16 polarimeters designed and built at the SSC. For a full-scale flight over Antarctica, 32 of the detectors will be used to monitor the sky for radiation from gamma-ray bursts and solar flares.

The upcoming GRAPE flight will also serve as an engineering test for two other UNH experiments that will piggyback a ride on the balloon. The Fast Compton Telescope, or FACTEL, will be flown to see how well it handles the radiation environment at high altitudes in order to assess its design.

FACTEL (an effort led by UNH physics professor Jim Ryan) is based on work SSC scientists and engineers did in helping build the Imaging Compton Telescope (COMPTEL) onboard the 17-ton Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) that was put orbit in 1991. FACTEL represents an effort to demonstrate the latest technologies required to produce an upgraded version of COMPTEL, which should be vastly more efficient and produce much sharper imagery.

A second engineering test being performed on this flight, led by research assistant professor Peter Bloser, involves a new type of detector technology known as silicon photomultipliers. These devices are used to read out signals generated by radiation detectors. This represents a new technology that may prove valuable for many NASA space applications.

High-altitude balloons, with a volume of up to 30 million cubic feet (large enough to contain a football field) have been used to carry NASA experiments to the edge of space for more than 50 years. They provide a vastly cheaper and less time-consuming approach than satellite-based missions and afford an excellent opportunity for student research projects. Three physics graduate students are working on the current flight as part of their Ph.D. studies and several undergraduate students have also been involved in the flight preparations.

September 19, 2011

Farmed salmon found in wild Maine riviers, raising concern about diluting the wild stock

The Bangor Daily news reports that escapee farmed salmon have been found in rivers in Maine and New Brunswick, posing a threat to the genetic purity of wild salmon. The international firm Cooke Aquaculture has a number of salmon farms throughout the regioin.

It's a complicated issue, since few wild salmon are returning to rivers as it is.

Read the article here.

Safety Belt Use

There's a new statistic on automotive safety belt use in New Hampshire. It's now up to 75% although past years percentage wasn't mentioned. To me, it's no mystery. Any recent vintage car or truck has an alarm that sounds intermittantly unless the drivers belt is set. It would be difficult to disable the alarm (although I know a couple of easy ways). So, people buckle up just to keep the damned thing silent. I've always used lap and shoulder belts without fail, going as far as to install them in my first cars that didn't come with them.

So, perhaps the high use isn't a matter of educating the public as it should be attributed to the car manufacturers.

Earle RichÂ Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Mont Vernon

New Hampshire's most famous UFO abduction was 50 years ago today

What's the most famous thing to ever happen in New Hampshire? For a certain segment of society, it just might be Betty and Barney Hill's reported interaction with a UFO on Route 3 near Lincoln, which occurred 50 years ago tonight, and launched the whole "alien abduction" craze.

You can read all about it in my story here.

Map geeks unite, you have nothing to lose but your obsession over coastline lengths

I love maps, and I suspect many of you do, too - it's a geek-ish thing. Maps are a perfect combination of utility, beauty, engineering, mathematics, mystery and a bunch of other cool concepts. What's not to love?

Slate has a review today of a new book by Jeapordy uber-champ Ken Jennings called "Maphead" which details the world of the map-obsessed. Part of the discussion is how Google Earth and GPS have removed some of the mystery from maps, which is true. As a post-collegiate, I sometimes killed an hour by going into the library of a nearby university, hunting up the map room, and looking at road maps of the Sahara while fantasizing about future journeys. Now you can call up satellite views of the deepest desert in almost real time. That's a good thing, but it does have drawbacks.

Jennings' first book "Braniac," about trivia buffs, was surprisingly good; I figured it would be a lame pseudo-celebrity tome but it was fascinating and well written. I think I'll put "Maphead" on my Christmas list.

Reintroduced wild turkeys becoming a problem out west - a sign of things to come for us?

The re-introduction of the wild turkey in New Hampshire has been incredibly successful. They were extirpated for a century before being returned from New York state to the Keene area in the late 1970s and then expanding throughout much of the state.

The public reaction from a sighting have evolved over the years from "holy cow, is that a wild turkey?!?!" to "cu-u-u-u-te!" to "hurry up and cross the %$!#* road so you'll stop blocking my commute!" Familarity breeds contempt.

I've long wondered if turkeys' success will send them down the Canada goose route, turning them into such an outright pest that we start killing them outside of the spring and fall hunting seasons. In Colorado, it seems, that is already happening: According to this article from The Westerner, "Colorado wildlife managers plan to mobilize hunters to thin the thickening flocks of wild âconflict turkeys' that hinder farmers and ranchers."

I have heard of farmers having some problems with turkeys invading fields in New Hampshire, although not to a great extent. I wonder how long before we hear the phrase "conflict turkeys" in the Northeast?

Nuclear experts to speak in NH

MANCHESTER â A nuclear plant official and a regulatory attorney will be speaking at St. Anselm College on Tuesday night about the nuclear industry in the wake of the Fukushima-Daiichi accident in Japan, and how the changes affect Seabrook and other New England nuclear reactors.

The two are part of Clean Energy America, which is sponsored by the nuclear industry lobbying group Nuclear Energy Institute.

The discussion will be led by Will Cothen, a senior reactor operator at FirstEnergy's Beaver Valley Power Station in Pennsylvania and Amy Roma, an attorney specializing in nuclear regulatory issues with Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C.

They are coming to New Hampshire partly because the operator of Seabrook Station nuclear power plant, FPL, has filed for a 20-year license extension with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which would allow for operations to continue until 2050. The Vermont Yankee plant, on the Connecticut River adjoining New Hampshire, may have to shut next year unless the state of Vermont OKs an extension for its operation.

The two will appear at UNH in Durham at 3 p.m. and at St. Anselm at 6 p.m.

September 20, 2011

No âgenius' grants in NH, three from Harvard (and boy, that branding was pure genius)

None of the 22 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grants for 2011 went to New Hampshire folks, although three went to Harvard scientists. The Globe describes them as "an economist who studies racial disparities, a physicist who probes the quantum behavior of ultracold atoms, and a clinical psychologist working to better understand suicide and how to stop people from harming themselves."

Each gets a five-year $500,000 award, no strings attached, and the knowledge of how they will be described on first reference in all news stories for the rest of their lives. Unless one of them wins a Nobel Prize, of course. (Or an Ig Nobel.)

The full list is here. The Boston.com story is here.

Plans afoot for a 'smart grid' in Worcester

Worcester and National Grid are holding a two-day summit, in which 300 residents and varied interest groups will help to define a smart grid strategy for the city, and National Grid's own plans for a smart grid implementation across the state. So reports Mass High Tech in this report.

Worcester Business Journal has a story (read it here) in which it is argued that cities are the right size to lead in this sort of technology. "National Grid intends to file plans with the Massachusetts Department of Utilities at the end of this year to implement a smart grid pilot program for 15,000 customers in Worcester."

September 21, 2011

The global warming debate gets people even madder than the atomic power debate

It sounds like a weird geeky joke: What did the ~~plastics~~ engineer say to the physics professor after the contentious debate about atomic power? Answer: "You're a global-warming-ist!"

Not a very funny joke, I grant you, but it was kind of funny to see.

It happened after a public talk Tuesday night at St. Anselm College's New Hampshire Institute of Politics, which hosted a couple of nuclear-power-industry folks to talk about the state of the industry, post-Fukishima. The session got a little testy at the end, with pro- and anti-nuclear folks interrupting each other and shattering the desired air of genteel PowerPoint academic discourse, leading an organizer to take the unusual step of insisting that the institute wasn't taking sides. Atomic power is a topic that, understandably, draws strong feelings.

Here's the funny, or funny-ish, part. One audience member, a ~~plastics~~ (see comment below, presumably from him) engineer and business owner, started off his question with a diatribe against global warming because the speakers had touted nuclear power's carbon-neutral position. He holds the common, flawed belief that water vapor's role in warming is so great that human activitiy is irrelevant, answered nicely here.

After the talk, a St. Anselm physics professor tried to explain the issue, but as they stood and talked the engineer demonstrated that smartest-guy-in-the-room attitude which turns so many people against the sciences and kept loudly interrupting. (He even called the physicist a "global-warming-ist", a wonderful term I hadn't heard before.) Professors don't take kindly to being interrupted, so the physicist got mad in return. Voices were raised, and for a minute I sensed a small possibility of fisticuffs. It got defused, but not before demonstrating how contentious the topic of global warming has become - and showing some of the startled political-science undergrads in attendance that science isn't always boring and cold-blooded.

As for the talk itself, the speakers, a power-plant engineer and a lawyer, were knowledgeable but came across as rah-rah corporate apologists (although I agreed with most of their points), while the anti-nuclear folks in the audience came across as long-winded fuzzy thinkers (although they had some good points lurking in the verbiage) so unfortunately I didn't find it very useful.

Tonight in Concord, 7 p.m.: Science Cafe about vaccination

Science Cafe New Hampshire restarts after a summer hiatus tonight with what should be a doozy: "To Vaccinate or Not To Vaccinate." Panelists include Dr. Jose Montero, who as state epidemiologist is probably the highest-profile medical professional in New Hampshire, and pediatrician (and newish mom) Dr. Jennifer Gittzus of Concord Hospital.

The free event starts at 7 p.m. in the basement of the Barley House restaurant, on Main Street, Concord, across from the Statehouse. Get there early to get a seat. I'm moderating and promise to be impartial, although I have made my feelings about the topic known.

For details, check the Science Cafe NH website.

The next cafe, on Wednesday, Oct. 19, will dicuss "Digital Privacy: Is it possible? Is it desirable?"

September 22, 2011

Celebrating the dark night sky

At Acadia National Park, they're celebrating the lack of light pollution with a "Night Sky Festival" (Short article here)

I have often thought that New Hampshire's North Country should apply to become an International Dark Sky Reserve, and use that in its tourist promotions - "Come See the Milky Way, the Way Your Grandparents Did", or something like that. Of course, then people get really mad when it rains â¦

The closest reserve I know of is in Quebec, around Mont Megantic, where there's an observatory.

What are the odds you (or, worse, me) will be hit by NASA's falling satellite?

NASA says there's a 1/3,200 chance that somebody will be hit by a piece of Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite when it falls to Earth tomorrow (Friday). That sounds scarily high, but only because it's a global composite.

For each individual, the odds are only one-in-several-trillion (or maybe 100 billion) that he/she will get hit - a number that factors in the facts that only certain latitudes are vulnerable and that populations are "clumped", with lots of empty space where falling debris has zero chance of hitting a human.

This post on space.com goes into the details.

September 23, 2011

Wet Flue Gas Desulfurization

PSNH says the "scrubber" at its biggest coal-fired power plant, Merrimack Station, is about a year ahead of shedual and could begin testing this week. The $450 million project is designed to remove 80 percent of the mercruy and 90 percent of sulfur from the emissions.

Here's the press release, which included the graphic I have attached here.

The scrubber produced one of New Hampshire's most ironic environmental debates last year. The high cost (roughly double earlier estimates) led environmentalists to say it was a waste of money, because it does nothing to cut carbon emissions, while PSNH insisted that the scrubbe should be built, partly because they get a guaranteed return on the capital expenditure. It was ironic because PSNH fought against the project when it was proposed in the early 2000s and environmentalists forced it on them.

NH biofuel startup hopes for $100 million from an IPO

Mascoma Corp. of Lebanon, which has been trying to tweak bacteria to develop a one-step way to turn cellulose into ethanol, plans to go public and hopes to raise as much as $100 million. I'm a little late on this: Here's a week-old Xconomy article.

I've written about Mascoma since 2007, when "ceullosic biofuel" was a hot topic. The article is hidden within our archives and not directly linkable, but I do like this bit about why everybody wants to turn cellulose, the part of plants that holds up structures, into ethanol even though it's much harder than doing it with corn kernels: "If it's so much work, why bother? Because plants make a lot more cellulose than seeds. Consider your own garden: Is it easier to grow weeds or strawberries?"

Here's a GreentechMedia story.

September 25, 2011

A first look (for me, that is) at 3-D printing

It's a little hard for us outsider laymen to tell, but 3-D printing feels like it could turn into a truly revolutionary technology, doing to manufacturing what the PC and open-source software did to the computer industry. I have a long story about it in today's Sunday Telegraph (read it here) with an emphasis on a couple of local companies that make and/or sell 3-D printers, as well as the folks at MakeItLabs who just gone one themselves.

If you know much about the field you'll find the story pretty rudimentary - but hey, we've got to start somewhere!

Merrimack's Solidscape has a bunch of videos on YouTube demonstrating their products, which act as a good introduction to the technology: Here's one of them.

September 26, 2011

Horse-drawn carriages collide due to âmalfunction'

I don't want to be glib about this, because at least one person was seriously hurt, but in all my years on a newspaper I have never seen an accident report like the one from Applecrest Farm Orchards in Hampton Falls. it concerns what is described in Official Police-Speak as "an incident* involving two horse-drawn carriages." From the police press release:

Initial on-scene investigation revealed that each carriage was being drawn by two (2) horses and each carriage was traveling in an opposite direction when it appears that a portion of one of the carriages malfunctioned. As a result of this malfunction, the operator of each carriage lost control of the horses.

Just goes to show that all technology is potentially dangerous, even old technology.

* "Incident" is official terminology for anything from littering to a nuclear power-plant meltdown.

Photo by Don HimselThat gauzy stuff in trees each autum are woven by webworms, which are really moth caterpillars.

Webworms in the trees: Messy, not harmful

My Telegraph column, complete with a video that shows why my attempts at becoming Carl Sagan 2.0 are unlikely to succeed, concers webworms, the messy-but-not-harmful caterpillars that clutter up trees this time of years. You can read it here.

Giant air cannon destroying things by firing pumpkins at them ! Woo-hoo!!

The annual Milford Great Pumpkin Festival is one of those family-friendly autumn events that take place around the country. Amid the scarecrows and pies and face-painting, they've long had an interest in public destruction related to pumpkins; for several years they featured a locally built trebuchet that flung pumpkins into Railroad Pond, trying to sink a boat.

They've gone one better, however, with American Chunker, a massive air cannon that shoots 8-pound pumpkins almost a mile. This Saturday, the cannon (and it really is a cannon - an impressive 10,000-pound piece of machinery) will be firing pumpkins at a 30-foot camper, trying to punch holes in it.

If that doesn't beat face-painting, I don't know what does.

Feds give loan guarantee to 99-MW wind park in Coos County

The 99-megawatt Granite Reliable Power Windpark (kind of a funny name for a wind farm, which isn't that reliable compared to fossil fuel plants) has gotten a $169 million loan guarantee from the federal government. That's about two-thirds of the cost of the 33-turbine farm, which will be only the second big windfarm in NH when it's finished. I'm not sure of the construction timeline: Here's the not-very-updated web site; here's the Department of Energy loan announcement.

September 27, 2011

Could biofuel be made from wood using just water, not microbes?

Even as New Hampshire's Mascoma prepares for a $100 million (they hope) IPO as they try to commercialize cellulosic biofuel, a firm down south says it has a way to turn wood into fuel that uses water, rather than complicated microbes, to break down those pesky cellulose walls. From a NY Times story:

The process developed by Renmatix involves putting hardwoods into a small pressurized chamber. One class of sugars, the type with five carbon atoms, is broken off and harvested. The remaining material is pumped into a second pressurized vessel for a longer period to release the remaining sugars. â¦ In both phases, the cellulosic material is treated by water at a pressure and temperature that is so high that the water is neither steam or an ordinary liquid but in a form known as "supercritical." (Read the whole NYT story here) (Here's a CNET story)

It sounds interesting - alarming if you're Mascoma - but the technology is also at such an early stage that it'sh hard to say how viable it is. Turning lab technology into large-scale industrial processes is very, very difficult.

Northern Lights tonight, due to big solar flares? I'll be out looking!

NASA says that big solar flares are sending a geomagnetic storm our way, which may translate into Northern Lights tonight. Oh boy: I'll be out there looking! (Except it's supposed to be cloudy - ARGH!!!!)

Story here.

Oh, and it might knock out some satellites â¦ but that's a small price to pay if we get to see colored lights in the New Hampshire sky!

Lots of rain means lots of mushrooms means lots of mushroom poisonings

I think the headline says it all. N.H. has seen 31 emergency-room visits this year from eating toxic 'shrooms, including 18 in September alone, compared to 11 in all of last year. Here's my story.

UPDATE:It has been pointed out to me that one thing I didn't examine in my story is whether all those cases involved people seeking mushrooms to eat or mushrooms to provide, shall we say, a different experience. I don't know whether there are any species of "magic mushrooms" growing in New Hampshire.

September 28, 2011

Really low tide sends Maine's first cruise ship skedaddling

UPDATE: A follow-up story (read it here) crunches the numbers, and notes that wind is an extra factor.

The first cruise liner to use Portland's new "megaberth" left three hours early Tuesday, stranding lots of people, because the opposition of the sun and moon made low tide particularly low, and the captain was worried about getting stuck. Passengers eventually were ferried to the Caribbean Princess in motorboats.

Presumably the cruise line hadn't factored all local depths during such "astronomical low tides" when calculating departure times.

Here's a Portland Press-Herald story.

Outrageous! Rubik's Cube isn't in the Toy Hall of Fame

The National Toy Hall of Fame recently added playing cards and the board game Life to its roster of winners. Both are well-deserved, of course, but looking through the list (www.toyhalloffame.org/toys) led to an appalling realization: Rubik's Cube isn't there! Geekdom should be outraged.

On the other hand, the Atari 2600 Game System is there, so we can't complain too much about anti-geek bias.

The most interesting inductee is "the stick", which the Hall calls "perhaps the world's oldest toy." Thinking back on my kids' early childhood, I think "the mud puddle" would challenge it for that title.

September 29, 2011

The deadliness of sewer gas

When I wrote a few weeks ago about Nashua changing its unique triangular manhole covers, I noted that the cause is safety: They're too small to handle people wearing breathing apparatus.

Do you really need a breathing apparatus to go down in a sewer, some people asked me. The answer came tragically Tuessday in Maine, where two experienced workers died in a sewage pump tank because they'd been overcome by a sudden rush of hydrogen sulfide. A story about the autopsy is here.

The gas is, says the wikipedia article, a "broad-spectrum poison" that It "forms a complex bond with iron in the mitochondrial cytochrome enzymes, thus preventing cellular respiration."

Red Sox fans, it's time to switch allegiance to the U.S. Chess League

While we all listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth generated by Red Sox fans throughout the Northeast (update for non-sports folks: the team blew a historically large lead and will miss the playoffs), I would like to remind Boston-area sports fans that they have an outlet: The area has not one but two teams playing in the U.S. Chess League, as I noted recently, so you can stop your sobbing and start cheering.

Here's the US Chess League home site, with breaking news like this:

With a resounding win over SM Jorge Samour-Hasbun, one of the most exciting players in the USCL, Shankland (left) led the Nor'easters to a much needed 3.5 - 0.5 victory over their archrivals, the Boston Blitz. The Nor'easters improved to 1.5 - 3.5 on the season and need to keep winning matches if they want a chance to defend their 2010 Title.

Watch tonight's Ig Nobel awards live on the Telegraph's Web site

(UPDATE: The show is over and Tom Lehrer's "The Elements", which was sung a couple of times as you would expect in a year when Chemistry was the theme, is indelibly in my head. They also did a version called "Aristotle's âThe Elements'" with the same tune, although earth/air/fire/water made for a much shorter song. The Ig Nobel fokls are scheduled to put up a replay of the show, if you missed the stream.)

I'm going to be in Harvard tonight watching the Ig Nobel awards from the balcony of Sanders Theater and you aren't - hahahahaha!

But you can watch them anyway on a special page on the Telegraph's web site that, if all goes as planned* will host the live video feed from the ceremony. It starts at 7:30 p.m. tonight, so check it out.

This is the site: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/topics/ignobel2011

September 30, 2011

Artificial photosynthesis - another good dream to pursue

Lots of cool technology is being worked on at MIT - the Globe could probably run a weekly column about it. The latest example, an attempt to create artificial photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using just light as a power source - the idea being to create hydrogen for fuel cells. The story can be read here â¦ but make sure you don't miss the most important sentence, which could appear within the first three paragraphs of virtually any MIT-research story: "The next step, he said, is to make the technology work on a large scale."

Is the total number of children in the world now at its maximum?

A Scandinavian professor named Hans Rosling has become famous in certain circles for his graphics-heavy analysis of world demographic trends - aging, population growth, economic patterns, etc. (You may have seen this BBC video.)

There's a story about him at GreenTech Media which is built on an interesting claim, that the washing machine has done more to improve human existence than any invention in history. But to me, the really interesting claim is that even though the world's population is going to rise another 2 or 3 billion people, the sharp decline in birth rates means "The total amount of children in the world, two billion, is not growing." The proportion of working-age people to children or, increasingly, of retirement-age people to children is going to soar, but the total number of kids running around may be at its maximum today. Amazing. Here's the whole interview.

I wrote about how New Hampshire needs to face this very issue in the Telegraph this week: Report warns of health-care costs with elderly.

October 2011

You can read it, in all its Onion awesomeness, here.

October 2, 2011

It's cranberry harvest time

Years ago we took the kids to Nantucket for the day to watch the cranberry harvesting. It's very cool: They flood the fields, shake the plants, the berries float to the top and they suck them up with giant vacuum cleaners. Well worth seeing if you never have, and you don't have to leave the mainland to do it. Boston.com has a a photo essay on cranberry-harvesting season today: Check it out here.

We have friends with wild cranberries around a pond and we frequently go pick some by hand. That's a slow, cold, wet process.

Fungus from a wet year is ruining some leaf-peeping

I have a story in the Sunday Telegraph about widespread fungal disease and how it's squelching the color from alot of foliage this fall - including the maples at my home, which are pathetic this year. There's a short video if you want to take a look at how sad they are: Here's the story.

October 3, 2011

New Hampshire dragonfly survey is a source of good news

There are two kinds of "citizen science" initiatives - those that get volunteers to sit at their computers and do stuff (e.g., GalaxyZoo, the Mersenne Prime project) and those that get them to go outside and do stuff, usually searching for and recording wildlife. A perfect example of the latter is the New Hampshire Dragonfly Survey, which is winding up this fall after five years.

My Telegraph column today (read it here with some lovely photos) discusses its findings, which are all good news, unusually for environmental activism.

Storing electric heat in Maine homes is an interesting option

Tux Turkel in the Portland Press-Herald has a good story about a pilot program by the town-owned utility in Madison, Maine, to test "electric thermal storage heaters" that store electric heating when rates are lower. From the story (which has a great headline: "Testing the Heat of the Night"):

They foresee thousands of Maine homes and businesses cutting oil use with "thermal storage" heaters that take advantage of the cheaper electricity available at night in New England. In time, they see the heaters complementing development of wind power in the region, which tends to be most available in winter and at night.

Electric storage heaters convert "off-peak" electricity to heat and hold it in dense, ceramic bricks stacked in a heavily insulated cabinet. A thermostat and blower distribute the heat when needed. The heaters range from room units to whole-house models that also warm water. Costs run from $3,000 to $11,000.

Turkel understands technology, finance and energy, which allows him to put claims into perspective instead of just passing along whatever the advocate/entrepreneur/business says as fact. If only more news outlets had reporters like that!

Karner Blue butterfly in the Onion: If we go down, humanity will go down

New Hampshire's best-known endangered species - the Karner Blue butterfly, which lives in a few pine barrens around Concord - "writes" a column in the current Onion that has this wonderful slant:

I swear to you on all that is good and holy that before the Karner blue goes extinct, myself and the last remaining members of my species will take out as much of the human race as we possibly can. There will be mayhem. Children will die. People will suffer.

You think I'm kidding around? Keep messing with my habitat. Keep developing land and messing with my migratory patterns so that my food sources become even scarcer. Yeah, just keep on doing that and one night you're going to wake up with a knife to your throat.

Maybe then you'll take land conservation a little more seriously. But you know what? It will be too late.

October 4, 2011

Theft of historic documents from UVM library is a shocker

The University of Vermont was one of several schools hit by a pair of thieves who, police said, swiped historical documents and sold them. Nothing of scientific interest was taken, but some material related to Franklin Roosevelt and other U.S. presidents was recovered by authorities, according to this Free-Press story.

Old science/technology material can be valuable, of course, as Amherst NH-based RRAuctions demonstrates twice a year with its space/aviation auction (some material here). I wrote about their latest auction, which included documents for a steam-powered flying machine that an inventor tried to sell to the Confederacy. The Confederacy's engineers were not impressed. (My story is here)

A free lecture on mechanical CAD at Nashua's "maker-space"

Nashua's new maker-space, MakeItLabs, has lots of cool tools that members can use (including almost-ready 3-D printer) but what makes it really valuable is expertise - all those hacker/do-it-yourselfers whose brains you can pick in a loose, geeky-workshop atmosphere.

On Tuesday, Oct. 18, they're going to take expertise-sharing a step further with their first lecture - about MCAD, or Mechanical Computer-Aided Design. The presenter will be John Nolin, a research project engineer at the UNH-Space Science Center, a program manager for DesignSmith LLC, chairman of ASME/NNE, Founder of NH-SWUG, and formerly worked as a product specialist for Solidworks (the Merrimack-based 3-D printer firm).

It starts at 7:30 p.m., titled "An introduction to basic MCAD techniques and tools for creating 2D laser cutter profiles or 3D shapes for simple milling and rapid prototype production."

This presentation is free, and open to anybody, even if you're not a MakeItLabs members. Just email adam@makeitlabs.com if you would like to attend, so that we will have a rough idea on head count.

N.H.'s inventor of GPS says warrantless GPS tracking should be illegal

Roger Easton, whose realization that clocks needed to be up in the satellites in order for the Global Positioning System to work led to patents that give him the title "father of GPS", is among those asking the U.S. Supreme Court to ban GPS tracking by police without a warrant.

Easton, who now lives near Canaan, N.H., filed an amicus brief arguing that "law enforcement use of GPS without a warrant violates Americans' reasonable expectations of privacy." Here's a BoingBoing story.

I interviewed Easton last year, when he was admitted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

October 5, 2011

A screenshot of my Old Weather site, transcribing records from HMS Perth in the Red Sea ("Persian Straits") in April 1918

Transcribing old Royal Navy weather reports for 'citizen science'

I write a lot about "citizen science" projects, most recently the New Hampshire Dragonfly Survey, but I don't participate in them (unless you count CoCoRaHS, a rainfall-measuring program). Since I spend a lot of time at the computer, I figured I should sign up for an online program, to fill in idle moments.

I went to Zooniverse, which hosts a variety of these (including the best-know, GalaxyZoo, which gets people to help categorize deep-space objects) and after some pondering have joined Old Weather. It uses volunteers to transcribe scanned-in weather reports from Royal Navy vessels around the time of World War I, giving some baseline data about world weather. A screenshot is shown at left.

Using old records like this to provide real-world baselines is not uncommon in science. I wrote a while back about a program to transcribe century-old records of fishing catches at New England ports, to give oceanographers some idea of fish populations in previous years.

BoingBoing Steve Jobs memorial

The classiest Steve Jobs remembrance

Every site on the Web has something about Steve Jobs' death, but BoingBoing's redesign of its site into "classic Mac" fashion is the cleverest, I think.

October 6, 2011

A good year for returning Atlantic salmon (relatively speaking)

New Hampshire Figh & Game says more than 400 returning adult salmon were captured at the Lawrence, Mass., Fishway in 2011 - topping the modern-day record of 332 returning salmon in 1991. This success meant that biologists at the federal fish hatchery in Nashua had more broodstock salmon than they needed to produce the one million salmon fry that will be released in New Hampshire next spring as part of the Anadromous Fish Restoration Program, so they're releasing more big fish in New Hampshire rivers for anglers to pursue.

The program to return Atlantic salmon to New England hasn't exactly been a roaring success, since there's no realistic hope that a viable population will exist any time soon. There are so many variables in anadramous fish (spawn in fresh water, live in sea water) - the trips up and down rivers (the Merrimack is blocked by three large dams), the need for clean rivers to spawn in, the rising chance of getting caught at sea, higher temperatures changing ecosystems - that it's very very tough to make it work these days.

Did Steve Jobs' alternative therapies shorten his life?

Steve Jobs spent nine months or so using special diets and other "alternative" treatments, rather than surgery, after he was disagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When they didn't help, he turned to surgery and real medicine. He did pretty well, considering - living an active life for another 6 years - but you have to wonder whether he'd still be around if he'd gone under the knife more quickly.

The Daily Beast has a good long look at the issue: read it here. It also discusses how his controversial liver transplant (he jetted to another state where he could, basically, jump the queue and get ahead of other patients) might have actually harmed him.

Can leaf-peeping be made scientific? Start with color standards

As part of a good, comprehensive AP story about the way foliage change is getting later (read it here) I discovered the National Phenology Network, a citizen-science initiative to gather information about how plants and animals are changing as the climate does. One of the things it is doing is "coming up with standards to be used by observers in reporting foliage color change."

You can't have good science without good measurements, and you can't have good measurement without good standards.

Similarly, UNH's Barry Rock has been doing spectral analysis on satellite photos of the state during leaf-peeping season to quantify changes. He has told me of evidence pointing to a dimming of color, perhaps due to what seems to be a decline in sugar content in maples. UNH magazine, by coincidence, has a big story about this just out.

October 7, 2011

Energy grid plans to start factoring in home efficiency

ISO-New England, the folks who run the region's power grid, had a big presentation for reporters yesterday. This long AP story hits most of the highlights, including our increasing dependence on natural gas and the fact that some aging coal plants are likely to be shut down in coming years, putting a strain on the system.

One thing that came up at the very end of the talk, however, is that ISO-NE is trying to figure out how to factor in all the various building-efficiency programs when making future predictions about what is needed. At the moment the efficiency push, like localized power production (e.g., home solar), isn't big enough to be a factor in overseeing a system that deals with up to 30,000 megawatts of production at a time - but Gordon van Welie, ISO-NE's chief executive officer, says that's going to change. The system is studying the issue and expects a report next year detailed how they will factor in efficiency programs (such as Better Buildings NH) when deciding, say, whether closed power plants need to be replaced at all.

Does winning an Ig Nobel help, or hurt, a scientist?

The Ig Nobel awards have come and gone for the 21st year, leaving harvard's stately Sanders Theater slightly shell-shocked at having been home to such shenanigans, and now it's time for an important question (important to scientists, anyway): Does winning an Ig help or hurt a researcher's career?

The Science Careers Blog pondered this weighty question - you can read the whole piece here. They reach no particular conclusion due to lack of data, but the story contains some interesting comments from Marc Abrahams, the power behind the Ig throne, about how some senior scientists have rejected nominations: In such cases, "Tthe senior scientist saw nothing funny about his (it's always a he in these cases) work and was highly, almost violently, offended that anyone (especially his own team) found pleasure and amusement in what they had done."

Fall Astronomy Festival at UNH this weekend

NASA astronaut and University of New Hampshire alumnus Lee Morin will be among the participants at UNH's first New England Fall Astronomy Festival.

The festival, being held Friday and Saturday at the UNH Observatory in Durham, includes sky-watching with telescopes, talks by amateur astronomers and professional scientists, rocket launches and hands-on activities for kids.

Morin, a naval flight surgeon who took part in the 13th space mission of the shuttle Atlantis in 2002, will deliver a keynote address Saturday. He graduated from UNH in 1974.

October 8, 2011

A New England tradition: Marking property lines with blazes in 'witness trees'

There's a fascinating article in the Bangord Daily News about "witness trees":

Although "witness tree" is the name often given to trees that were in the area where certain historic events took place, such as the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War, their fame in New England is for their roles in marking boundaries.

The idea of individual, private land ownership registered with a governmental entity, now called a register of deeds, was new when Europeans began settling the Americas.

"This was a new concept â keeping records on paper that showed a connection between ownership and land," he said. "Witness trees were used to designate property boundaries by towns, farmers and developers. Blazing with an ax or chiseling the name of the owner into prominent trees on properties was very common."

The article talks about researchers finding old pieces of wood kept in a Registry of Deeds office from the late 1700s, when they were entered as evidence in a land dispute case!

Read the whole article here - it's worth the time.

October 9, 2011

Steve Jobs was brilliant, but he sure could be a jerk

All the hagiography for Steve Jobs is well deserved on the business front, but I'm glad I never worked for him. Jobs suffered from "smartest guy in the room" syndrome - he was the "doesn't suffer fools gladly" kind of guy who believes that rules don't apply to him because he's special. It's more bearable for Jobs than for most such folks because he was special, but nonetheless that attitude is pretty damn hard to swallow.

Case his point: His habit of parking his very expensive sports car in handicapped parking spaces - because, of course, he's too important to waste time walking from a space that's farther away from the door. Those rules are for us little people.

Wonderful quote in that post, by the way:

Quipped former Apple executive, Jean-Louis Gassee, when he saw Jobs park in a restricted spot: "I never realized those spaces were for the emotionally handicapped."

October 10, 2011

Today's techno-contemplation: 'Will the e-book kill the footnote'?

Last night at dinner my family got to discussing footnoes - my son is a math major and does all his work in a mathematics-symbol-heavy version of Donald Knuth's TeX, and my wife and I were wondering how that worked. We oldsters reminisced about what a pain it was to make footnotes in the old typewriter days - you had to estimate the number of lines, count lines upward, determine when to stop the body, etc. That is one thing where technology has definitely improved things enormously.*

But are footnotes themselves passe in the electronic age? This NYTimes essay by a writer named Alexandra Horowitz says ebooks will kill them because it's killing the entire idea of a page, even though hyperlinks could be considered footnotes on steroids. From the essay:

Even the audio book has solved the problem of how to convey footnotes. Listen to David Foster Wallace reading his essay collection "Consider the Lobster," with its ubiquitous show-stealing asides: at a certain point, his voice is unnaturally distant, the result of a production trick intended to represent the small type of a footnote. Wallace's e-book was not immune to de-footnoting, though; all these crucial asides now appear at the end of the book in the Kindle and iPad versions.

I like footnotes, kept close to the text they're discussing. They feel like a different "voice".

* Along with eliminating carbon paper. (Yes, I had to put a footnote in this post.)

In case we forgot dry July was, the chart giving precipitation data at my house will remind us. (I wasn't involved for all of November)

A year's worth of precipitation data in my yard

I have been a precipitation-measurer for CoCoRaHS (a "citizen science" weather-watching project) for almost a year. They measure annual data from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 for meteorological reasons, and just released data for my site. I missed October and part of November, so it's incomplete, but I had 47.29 inches of water falling from the sky, including 62.5 inches of snow (which melted down to about 6-7 inches of water).

It's hard to know what to make of this, since there's no historical data to compare it with â¦ which explains why scientists work so hard to establish baseline data about everything.

October 11, 2011

A trip to Chocoura shows that foliage was less bed than I feared

The foliage season has been so dreadful in my neck of the woods (due to a fungul outbreak, as I noted earlier this month) that I'd been afraid it was ruined everywhere. Happily, a day hike to Mount Chocoura yesterday showed that while it's not the best of seasons, and it's quite late in changing, there is color up north.

The Portland Press-Herald has a good piece today about how warm weather has helped delay and mute the season: read it here.

But don't get too optimistic: UNH Magazine has a good cover piece on continuing research by Barry Rock about how climate change is slowly making foliage season worse: Read it here. I've written about his work a couple of times, but it still makes me depressed.

I have always heard that Mount Chocoura, which is a little southwest of Conway, gives perhaps the best view for the hike in New Hampshire, and I wasn't disappointed. It's under 4000 feet and can be reached by some pretty easy trails, but provides eye-popping, 360-degree views of the Whites and Lakes Region. Like a bigger Mount Monadnock with more interesting things nearby to see.

Massive offshore wind farm gets (slightly) closer off Rhode Island

UPDATE: NY Times Green Blog has a lot more about the plan, including a proposal to use a new type of rotor with 165-meter rotors - holy cow! You can read it here

It's not much past the arm-waving phase but Deepwater Wind has made a federal application for a big wind farm in relatively shallow water well off Rhode Island - and I mean big: up to 1000 megawatts, which is more than twice the size of the beleaguered Cape Wind plan. It also would hook into both the New England and Long Island grids, providing one of the extra connections that the national grid badly needs.

Details from Mass High Tech can be read here.

Another company, Neptune Wind, has proposed a 500-megawatt site in roughly the same area (which has good wind, relatively shallow water far from shore, and proximity to cities that want electricity). But as I say, this is still very iffy.

October 12, 2011

Boston of "the future" seen from 1900: Where are the moving sidewalks?

The Smithsonian has a great item about a 1900 Boston Globe article imagining Boston a century hence (i.e., roughly now). A sample:

when the tides in the harbor will be made for furnish[ing] heat light and power, when every person will own his own automobile, or whatever it may be called in that day; when people have learned how to live longer and suffer less from sickness; when sewage and garbage nuisances will no more exist. â¦ It is not too much of a task on the imagination to believe that women will have taken a much more important position in the business and political life than they hold today.

On the other hand, the city doesn't have moving sidewalks (the ones in Logan don't count) or efficient pneumatic tube delivery systems. I love this paragraph:

Most of the baseball cranks of today are confident that the national game will continue to hold its prestige through the coming century, and that it is likely to be played at night as well as by day, inasmuch as the illuminating methods of the future are reasonably certain to practically banish darkness from our cities.

"Baseball cranks"! Ha! Read the whole thing here.

(Spotted via the Globe's always-interesting Braniac blog.)

What can the health of one stream tell us about the health of an entire river system?

From UNH News Service: University of New Hampshire scientists have received National Science Foundation funding to explore how small-scale ecological experiments can be applied to understand the behavior of entire ecosystems, part of the agency's nascent effort to investigate large-scale biological responses to climate and land-use change.

Professor William McDowell of the department of natural resources and the environment (NREN) and assistant professor Wilfred Wollheim of NREN and UNH's Institute for the Study or Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) are part of a multi-institution project that will "scale up" measurements of fundamental stream or "lotic" properties, and the effects of aquatic animals on those properties, to predict characteristics of entire stream networks.

"This project is looking at how we can scale fundamental processes of stream ecology to a whole-stream scale," says McDowell. "We also want to learn how good our individual site-specific work is at predicting broad patterns across the continent." McDowell will conduct field work in Puerto Rico on a tropical dry forest stream dominated by mullets and freshwater shrimp. He will explore stream metabolism â how carbon is produced, consumed and vented into the atmosphere â as well as nutrient retention and the effects of predators and herbivores on stream metabolism and nutrient cycling.

Across the North American continent, the SCALER experiment will be carried out in a tropical forest, a temperate mountain forest, a prairie, a northern evergreen forest, and a tundra. Small, medium and large streams in each area will be examined at scales of centimeters to tens of meters. Modeling will be done to scale measurements up to regional and continental levels.

"Modeling in environmental studies is a way to tie together what we understand about various aspects of the environment so that we can determine how the entire system works," notes Wollheim of the Water Systems Analysis Group within EOS, who will conduct the core modeling to translate measurements in individual stream sections, or "reaches", up to entire river systems and, ultimately, continental scales. "The models I'll work with will help us to better understand how and why ecosystems are changing, given climate variations and various human activities."

For their project, entitled "Stream Consumers and Lotic Ecosystem Rates (SCALER): Scaling from Centimeters to Continents," McDowell is the UNH principal investigator; Wollheim is co-investigator. Researchers at Kansas State University are leading the $3.3 million project, of which $741,000 will support the UNH research.

Part of the experiment will involve "consumer manipulation" within a measurable section of a stream by taking away or adding animals like aquatic insects or fish to see what effects these animals have on the overall stream processes.

The experiments and modeling results will be relevant to ecology as a whole because few "coupled and nested" experimental and theoretical scaling exercises have been undertaken in any environment. A coupled, nested environment is one that links many smaller parts with a larger whole â in this case, the overall flow of water links different stream reaches into a larger river network.

Says Wollheim, "Very few studies have tried to understand processes across these different scales to determine, for example, how does carbon storage measured in individual stream reaches relate to carbon storage of an entire river network?"

Insight into how nature works at this level is necessary to understand both whole-system dynamics as well as to manage human impacts on entire watersheds.

NSF's large-scale biology program, a first for the agency, will tackle big questions in search of equally big answers: How will the biosphere respond to natural and human-induced changes across a range of time and space scales? What is the pace and pattern of the responses? What is the effect on ecosystem services, such as the availability of freshwater, across regions and continents?

October 13, 2011

You don't have to tell Newfoundland that moose are bad for cars, as this road sign (so much more graphic than New Hampshire's "Brake for Moose" logo) demonstrates

The world's most dangerous animal is the moose - if you're a car driver, that is

Slate's excellent Explainer column today examines the question "Which animal makes for the deadliest hazard on the road?" and concludes, "probably the moose." As it notes: "few potential roadkill have the moose's combination of size, speed, and proximity to traffic. Camels and horses may be similar in speed and size to moose, but they tend to be tied up or confined." You can read the whole item here.

Of course, this isn't a problem where moose don't exist. In Australia, kangaroos are the big issue; "in Africa, a large antelope, like the giant eland, could do as much damage as a moose, but most of these animals graze a little farther from the freeways."

The item says the U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that "about 5 percent of U.S. motor vehicle collisions, or between 1 and 2 million crashes per year, involve animals. That number reflects an increase of approximately 50 percent between 1990 and 2004â³ due largely to the increase in the deer herd all over the country.

Mass. battery firm A123 may power GM's electric "city car"

General Motors is likely to announce (soon, so reports say) that it will develop an all-electric "city car" based on the Spark model that they sell overseas. Acording to Greentechmedia, it will be powered by nanophosphate lithium-ion battery packsfrom A123 Systems of Watertown, Mass.

Here's the Greentech Media piece.

Here's the GM website for the Spark.

Even cooler than an electric car is a Segway-based personal transportation pod, which GM has been talking about: CNet news item here. I'm not holding my breath, though.

GraniteGeek is the blog of the year, says state press association

This is New Hampshire's 2011 Blog of the Year Best Blog (I looked at the plaque more closely), says the New Hampshire Press Association, which gave me the award today at its annual dinner - a luncheon this year, since times are tough in the new business.

I believe this is the first year they've given a Best Blog award, and it's quite possible that no other newspaper even entered the category, so I'll try not to get too swollen a head.

But I do have to ponder the fact that I have previously won awards* for writing stories. Now it's for writing blog posts. Next year I hope to win Tweet of the Year, and then perhaps after that I'll win Adjectival Subclause of the Year.

There is, actually, some news coming out of the ceremony: The association, which represents daily and non-daily newspapers, will allow digital-only journalism publications to join - which means Patch.com, with a half-dozen bureaus in the state. I'm not sure if there are other freelance blogger types who'd want to cough up membership dues, but that would be very cool.

* If you've been a newspaper reporter for more than five years and haven't won at least one award, you aren't trying â¦ we love to give each other awards.

UNH says digital books save class "more than $70,000â³ in textbook fees

From UNH News Service: A digital textbook program launched this semester at the University of New Hampshire Whittemore School of Business and Economics has saved students more than $70,000 in textbook costs, the university claims.

The e-textbook initiative is the result of a textbook licensing agreement between the Whittemore School, the UNH Bookstore and open textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge. The formats available include an online web book; print-it-yourself PDF; e-book for an iPad, Kindle or other tablet; and audiobook for an iPod or MP3 player. A low-cost print-on-demand option also is available for students who prefer a physical book.

Digital delivery of the e-text package is managed by the UNH Bookstore, which assigns a unique authorization code to each student for access to the course content that doesn't expire and can be transferred from device to device.

The majority of UNH's digital books are offered on the free NookStudy platform, which allows students to highlight materials, link to websites and course notes, and create study guides for exams straight from the textbook.

In addition to its digital textbooks, Flat World Knowledge offers an open licensing model that allows instructors to revise, remix, and incorporate their own contributions so their textbooks more directly relate to the focus and learning objectives of a specific course.

While UNH has been expanding its digital textbook offerings, this is the first time an entire class has used only a digital textbook. Instead of purchasing hard copies of their textbook, the more than 600 students enrolled in Prof. Ross Gittell's "Introduction to Business" course at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics paid just $33.25 for unlimited online access for the term.

Conventional hard-cover textbooks average $150 each. Textbook prices have increased 22 percent over the last four years, quadruple inflation, according to the Student Public Interest Research Groups. The College Board estimates that students spend an average of $1,137 for textbooks and supplies each year.

"Students are benefiting from substantially lower textbook costs, as well as from having immediate access to their course materials from the first day of class," said Ross Gittell, the James R. Carter Professor at the Whittemore School. "A textbook licensing model of this kind has the potential for significant universitywide savings, while increasing educational opportunities for more people that can help grow our economy."

Approximately half of the textbooks sold at the UNH Bookstore have the digital option, which saves students an average of 60 percent off the price of the printed book, the store said. This fall, students saved $88,500 by opting for the digital version of textbooks at the UNH Bookstore, which includes Gittell's students.

"It is very convenient to find the information you're looking for right on your computer where students do most of their work anyway. The online textbook was so much cheaper than the rest of my books and, in some cases, it is better than my hard copies ," said first-year student Chris McPhee of Marshfield, Mass., who is taking Gittell's class.

Gittell and two colleagues have written new chapters on sustainability and business and public policy that weren't in the original version of "Exploring Business" by Karen Collins, one of the two digital books used in the "Introduction to Business" course.

October 14, 2011

Underground cables face problems, too - like hungry rats

Many years ago, when the independent Hollis/Wilton Telephone Company still operated the phone system in those two towns (its now part of TDS), Hollis lost its DSL service for a day or two because a squirrel got into an overhead cable box and gnawed through a cable. (Or maybe it was dial-up that was lost, since it was that long ago; I forget exactly.)

We all thought this was a hoot, but maybe we should have been kinder: roughly the same thing happened to most of the broadband in Scotland recently, when a rat chewed through a buried fiber-optic cable. Read the story here.

Dennis Ritche (creator of C, Unix) was at least as important as Steve Jobs

New Hampshire's Linux uber-dude Jon "maddog" Hall pointed out to me the disparity in news coverge between the death of Steven Jobs and the death within the past week of Dennis Ritchie, who wrote the C programming language and co-created Unix. ""The death of someone who argumentatively affected more people in a positive way (both directly and indirectly) than Steve Jobs did" has gotten almost no popular press, he noted sadly.

It's obvious why, of course - iPod/iPhone touched more lives in an obvious way than Unix, although the reverse might be true if you look under the hood - but Hall was still a bit annoyed.

So I point to Salon which a remembrance today, calling Richie "the geek Prometheus" - read it here. The NY times has a story (here) as does the Wall Street Journal (here)

October 15, 2011

Crabapple leaves found by Eleanor Broussard in N.H. in mid-October

The most astonishing color-changed leaves I've seen

This picture of crabapple leaves was posted by Rick Broussard, editor of New Hampshire Magazine, on his Facebook page. He says his daughter found them on the way home from school. I've never seen anything like them, so I did what everybody does online and swiped the picture!

October 16, 2011

'Manipulating' a lottery by using knowledge instead of dumb luck is, apparently, a bad thing

State-run lotteries are, as the saying goes, a tax on the mathematically ignorant. Occasionally, the application of math and effort can beat their ridiculous odds, as happened occasionally in a game called Cash WinFall in Massachusetts. The game "rolls down" unearned winnings into lower tiers, which means that at certain points it becomes statistically worthwhile to buy lots and lots and lots of tickets - as various groups have done for years.

The Boston Globe has another big story on the process, including the fact that some lottery officials looked the other way, or even assisted groups in mass-buying tickets, because the sales looked good. You can read the story here.

The interesting thing to me, however, is the tone of the story: It regards these people who legally maniulated the lottery through knowledge - instead of hoping for blind luck - as being unpleasantly tricky or even downright thieves. Consider this line: "It appears that an extraordinary lapse by lottery officials last year allowed a group led by an MIT computer whiz to single-handedly hijack the game, winning more than $2 million - nearly the entire jackpot from a single drawing."

"Hijack"?

Or this line: "Their vast winnings came at the expense of regular bettors who play the game."

I think they should be celebrated as entrepreneurs. Interesting.

October 17, 2011

Compressed natural gas gets more popular as a trash-truck fuel

Nashua has bought nine new trash trucks that burn compressed natural gas. There's a hefty upfront cost (up to $40,000 per $200,000 truck, due largely to the cost of the tank, which has to hold gas under 3,600 psi) but lower fuel cost and lower maintenance cost down the road - and big environmental benefits, of course. I was told that up to a third of the new trash trucks in the country burn CNG rather than diesel.

http://www.cracked.com/article_19481_the-8-most-wildly-irresponsible-vintage-toys.html

Does digital privacy exist? Discuss Wednesday at Science Cafe NH

Science Cafe on Wednesday evening will discuss digital privacy â¦ does it exist? Can it exist? Should it exist?

As always with these free (FREE!!!!!!) casual events, discussion will be driven by the audience. So show up, buy a burger and beer, and let the ideas flow.

ScienceCafe.org is here. It is 7 to 9 p.m. at The Barley House in Concord (across from the Statehouse on Main Street). Be there and be geeky â¦.

In the meantime, here's a really interesting read about "A Day in the Life of Privacy" from SecurityWeek.com - it raises many of the questions we hope to chew over Wednesday night.

Eight firms vie for N.H. High-Tech Product of the Year

Eight New Hampshire companies are semi-finalists in the annaul New Hampshire Product of the Year contest run by the NH High Technology Council (NHHTC):

Bottomline Technologies of Portsmouth, which makes software for the financial industry; FossManufacturing of Hampton, which makes "engineered, non-woven" fabrics; Horizon Technology of Salem, which makes euqipment for automatic sample preparation; iGlobe of Franklin, which makes display equipment; Integra of Hudson, which makes laboratory tools; Labsphere of North Sutton, which makes "precision radiometric and photometric test and measurement products"; Russound of Newmarket, which makes multiroom audio equipment; and Scribe Software.of Manchester, which makes customer-relationship management software.

This week, company representatives will make formal presentations on their products to the judges and up to five finalists will be selected to present in front of a live audience at the 2011 POY event held on November 14 at the Radisson Hotel-Center of NH in Manchester. The finalists will also be awarded the Product of the Year Judges' Award at the event.

The entire audience casts their vote for their top product after the presentations are made. The audience vote counts towards 50% of the final tabulation and the initial judge's vote counts for the remaining 50%. The winner will be announced at the conclusion of the event and will earn the NHHTC Product of the Year crystal trophy. The trophy and the finalist's winning product will be on display at the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.

Companies that have won the Product of the Year award over the past five years were Nanocomp Technologies, UltraVision, Insight Tech Gear, Holase, Incorporated, and Sky-Skan.

October 18, 2011

On Saturday, N.H. gets its first SkeptiCamp

An unusual event is coming to the state this Saturday. It's called SkeptiCamp, a mix of high-speed university lectures, intellectual magic shows and do-it-yourself curiosity, designed to inform and illustrate about aspects of silliness-puncturing skepticism. It takes place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in The Barley House restaurant in Concord.

The camp consists of a dozen short (most last just 15 minutes) lectures and demonstrations about topics dear to the skeptics heart, including:

* How (and why) to make a bed of nails

* Probability basics for skeptics

* The Sugar Myth

* Irrational Stock Market

* Mathemagics

The presenters come from around the region, many involved with Granite State Skeptics, the loosely organized group which is hosting the event. Learn more at the wiki here. The camp is cohosted by the James Randi Educational Foundation.

Annoyingly, I will be tied up all day helping my local conservation commission build things (which is fun, too) so I'll miss it.

More online paywalls - this time for The Telegraph

The Telegraph has joined the legion of newspapers hoping they can make money by charging people to read content online. As of today, you can read 25 articles (not counting classifieds or the home page) per month for free.* If you want more, buy a subscription (please!!!!)

A subscription costs $13/month, either digital only or with a 7-day newspaper subscription, and costs $6/month with Sunday subscription. We want you to buy the print paper, folks - that's where the advertising money lies (such as it is these days)!

Here's the "Account Center" if you'd like to learn more: https://home.nashuatelegraph.com/clickshare/subscriptionCenter.do

We're not exactly trend-setters. BostonGlobe.com ended its free test today and now costs real money (Boston.com remains free) and most papers in NH already have similar paywalls. The big exception is the Union-Leader - it holds back some stories from the Web so you have to buy the paper to see them.

It will be interesting to see how this all works out. My paycheck hopes it works, although my browsing habit isn't happy.

*More if you do various cookie-cleaning browser tasks, although I think we're trying to squelch that

October 19, 2011

Bitcoin, the digital-only currency, crashes

I haven't tried to use Bitcoin - anybody out there have any experience with it? - but it's an intriguing idea, creating a brand-new digital-only currency. Unfortunately for those who have invested, its price has crashed, as ArsTechnica reports.

The New Yorker recently had a terrific article about the technology behid the software, and the fact that its originator remains anonymous: Read it here.

Power Sockets and Plugs

A little information on power sockets.

You might have noticed that sockets installed in a hospital are installed with the ground opening up, opposite from those in a typical home. The reason is that if a plug is partially pulled out and something falls on it, the first contact is with the neutral or ground line. There is a much lower chance of someone being electrocuted in that case.

What I take issue with is polarized line cords, those two wire cords with one of the plugs being wider than the other, used in battery chargers or other appliances that have plastic cases. There is no reason in the world why you should only have a 50% chance of inserting the plug right when using a hard-to-see outlet.

I take the offending plug and either file or use the belt sander to match it to the narrow end. Problem solved.

Don't forget: Science Cafe on "digital privacy" tonight in Concord

Don't forget: Tonight, Science Cafe New hampshire will discuss digital privacy â¦ does it exist? Can it exist? Should it exist?

As always with these free (FREE!!!!!!) casual events, discussion will be driven by the audience. So show up, buy a burger and beer, and let the ideas flow.

ScienceCafe.org is here. It is 7 to 9 p.m. at The Barley House in Concord (across from the Statehouse on Main Street). Be there and be geeky â¦.

In the meantime, here's a really interesting read about "A Day in the Life of Privacy" from SecurityWeek.com - it raises many of the questions we hope to chew over Wednesday night.

October 20, 2011

Digital privacy discussion at Science Cafe was a hit

The Science Cafe NH last night only drew about a dozen people - we blame the rain and the World Series - but the discussion was fabulous, two hours of informed give-and-take about digital privacy. It was exactly the sort of intelligent conversation that a room full of adults should have.

Diversity helped. The group ran the gamut in age from early-20-somethings to folks with grayer and/or less hair than me, and in opinion from :"we're doomed" to "it's no big deal." The panelists (technology attorney Cameron Schilling and Comcast spokesman Marc Goodman) really made it work.

The issues was summarized well by one attendee, who said it boiled down to control - that technology has lessened our ability to control other people's knowledge about us, our habits, our whereabouts, our anything. In return, it has given us control over mind-boggling amounts of other information; the question is whether the trade-off is worth it.

I asked everybody that question at the end - is the trade-off worth it? - and all but one person said yes, that the loss of traditional privacy was balanced by all the technical benefits it brings us. I suspect the one nay-sayer, an experienced uber-geek who name-dropped life at Digital Equipment Corp., was at least partly playing devil's advocate.

October 21, 2011

Today's offer: A free solar-flux-density detector for your back yard!

A "citizen science" program is being launched to help measure the albedo of winter snow cover in New Hampshire, via the CoCoRaHS volunteer precipitation-measuring program. I got a note last night from Mary Stampone of UNH, the state meteorologist and CoCoRaHS organizer (who was, incidentally, a panelist in the Science Cafe NH program on climate change last spring), saying that they had 20 pyranometers available for volunteers. I've included a sceen shot of part of the brochure, above.

A little wikipedia-ing showed me that a pyranometer is a solar flux density measuring device - basically a dome with black interior and various sensors that keep track of how much of each part of the solar spectrum is hitting the spot.

The devices are being offered as part of a three-year study aimed at monitoring NH snow cover and reflectiveness (an important piece of information for climate modeling). I can't get one, alas, because it requires a midday solar radiation observation at your test site, and at noon I'm at work not at home (unfortunately. But I'm sure that enough of the roughly 150 regular CoCoRaHS observers in N.H. will jump at the chance.

If you want to find out more, or become a CoCoRaHS observer, contact Stampone at mary.stampone@unh.edu.

Meteor shower tonight - go, go, Orionids!

Nine times out of 10 when I try to see a meteor shower it's either cloudy or the shower is a dud, but tonight's Orionids has potential. It will be clear and reasonably dark (the moon is waxing crescent), and not too cold considering the time of year. Maybe I'll set the alarm for 3 a.m. or so, and see what I can see.

For more on the shower, including where to look (southeast, before dawn), check NASA's page here.

Dangerous Toys

Just read a list and supposedly funny descriptions of dangerous toys marketed during the glorious 50's. Some of these I had, the chemistry sets, glass blowing sets and a couple of others. The authors were trying to make a point of how it was amazing that any kids survived the contact with stuff that could maim and kill. It wasn't really that bad. I learned an awful lot from doing the experiments, far more practical experience than I ever got in our tiny school system. I know how to blow glass, mix chemicals safely and handle electricity and power tools. I was pretty intense about learning this stuff. Popular Science and Popular Mechanics were very good, having regular columns on chemistry and other technical subjects. That was my real education.

I pity kids now that don't have a real chance to risk life and limb. Computers are supposed to take the place of hands-on experiments. But, every time I get a kid in my shop and expose them to real tools, making outrageous amounts of noise and sawdust or metal chips, the seed is planted. Buying a computerized toy, sitting back and watching it go through someone elses programmed idea of 'fun' is just so limiting.

The Maker Revolution is changing all that for the good. Kids and adults are getting very good at circuit bending, making electronics do what is needed instead of what was sold. Popular Science and Popular Mechanics have brought back the pages encouraging fun projects, even those considered dangerous and are supposed to be supervised by a cooperative adult. Make Magazine is full of great hands-on learning experiments.

Here's the link to that article I just read. Once you get past the sarcastic descriptions, don't you feel just a little envious that we can't now play with stuff like this? Those toys made my career as an engineer inevitable. I had a taste of controlling the world through electronics and mechanics. Thanks to Gilbert and other companies not too concerned about the legal system, I've had a great run.

Earle Rich ... Mont Vernon

October 23, 2011

Silly 'Bigfoot' film at Mt. Monadnock turns into a free-speech court case

After state park folks at Mount Monadnock wouldn't let a guy make a little film involving him in a Bigfoot suit, he sued. The Globe's story today summarizes it thus: "Though many elements of the dispute border on the absurd, the case raises some serious free speech issues."

Here's the whole story (from Boston.com, not BostonGlobe.com, so it's free).

Here's an NH Magazine story from earlier this year, with a nice picture of Doyle's Bigfoot suit, bought at the iParty store in Keene. It includes this insightful interview query:

It is difficult to hike up the mountain in costume? "Definitely tough to roam around in. The Bigfoot feet are like rubber slippers so your feet take a pounding. But it's for the love of the art!"

October 24, 2011

NH Aviation Museum building - photo by Kevin Harkins Photography

Museum gets bigger

The New Hampshire Aviation Museum is located in perhaps the coolest building of any museum around: The original terminal/control tower of what was then Grenier Field, now boring titled Manchester-Boston Regional Airport. The whole Art Deco building would probably fit on one luggage carousel at the current airport.

That's cool, certainly, but it was also confining, which is why it's good news that the airport has expanded and is now open seven days a week. The Sunday Telegraph has a report (complete with video) - read it here.

The museum's site is here.

Creating 'gas stations' for electric vehicles is a non-trivial job

My column today talks about the chicken-and-egg difficulty of creating a network of charging stations for electric vehicles before there are any out there to use it. The same problem has afflicted other alternative fuels such as compressed natural gas, which is why you don't see many CNG cars around.

Transportation and environmental officials in 10 Northeastern states, including all of New England, are trying to create a plan that will make it easier.

Read the column here.

Maine man drove his car 1 million miles and gets a hometown parade

I know a couple of people who are hoping to push their old cars to 250,000 miles, but I've never heard of somebody racking up 1 million on a single car until I read this Portland Press-Herald story. "Joe is a testament to what you can do if you maintain your car" is a quote from the story and it says a lot, although it doesn't hurt to own a simple reliable model (in this case, 1990 Honda Acord). He got a parade in Saco, Maine, plus a new Honda.

The story says the engine and transmission are original although "the car's seatbelts, steering wheel and upholstery have worn out and been replaced. The fuel pump blew at 741,000 miles, drawing laughter from his kids when the car had to be towed."

Let's see, a million miles in 21 years is about 48,000 miles a year. Even if he drove 60 mph the whole time, that's 33 days - more than a solid month - of sitting in your car every single year. Ugh.

October 25, 2011

Maine wood pellets -lots of them - are getting exported to Europe

Biomass energy (subject of the Science Cafe N.H. discussion in January, by the way) or creating heat/electricity by burning wood, is a weird stepchild of alternative energy - not very sexy, with its aura of old-fashioned throwback, but in this part of the world it's a big part of the potential mix for ditching fossil fuels. It's also part of the economic mix, as can be noted byplans in northeast Maine to build a mill that would make about 300,000 tons of wood pellets a year, 70percent for export to Europe, where biomass energy is well established.

Wood energy is not an economic swap for the departed paper industry - in general, loggers get less for their wood because it's worth less per finished ton, and the mills don't employ as many people. But it's something, and Northern New England needs something.

Here's a Press-Herald story, which notes that development of Maine's three deep ports (Portland, Searsport and Eastport) is key to such business.

UNH space scientists hitch rides with Japan and Europe

Some news from UNH (which includes a horrible forced acronym: "cross Scale COupling in Plasma universE or SCOPE")

Scientists and engineers from the University of New Hampshire's Space Science Center (SSC) have been selected to provide instruments for two upcoming satellite missions led by the European Space Agency and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The ESA Solar Orbiter mission will carry the Heavy Ion Sensor, which includes an ion composition telescope being built at UNH by a team led by research professor Antoinette Galvin of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) and the department of physics.

Solar Orbiter will venture closer to the Sun than any previous mission. It is designed to make major breakthroughs in our understanding of how the Sun influences its environment, in particular how it generates and propels the flow of particles, known as the solar wind, in which the planets are bathed. Launch is slated for January 2017.

"The Ion Composition Time-of-Flight/Energy Telescope we're building for the satellite's solar wind composition instrument will do the actual particle measurement," says Galvin. "So it's an essential role and one we're playing due to similar instrumentation we provided on NASA's STEREO mission. At this time we're the only U.S. institution still active in this particular field building this type of solar wind composition instrument."

The STEREO spacecraft, launched October 25, 2006 carries the UNH-built PLAsma and Supra-Thermal Ion Composition (PLASTIC) instrument. Galvin is the principal investigator for the PLASTIC instrument, which measures characteristics of protons, alpha particles and heavy ions. STEREO has dramatically improved our understanding of the powerful solar eruptions that can send more than a billion tons of the Sun's outer atmosphere hurtling into space.

For the JAXA "cross Scale COupling in Plasma universE" or SCOPE mission, a team led by professor Lynn Kistler was selected to proceed with an 11-month mission concept study for UNH's Ion Mass Spectrum Analyzer (IMSA), which also draws on historical work done at UNH, such as the CODIF (composition distribution function) instrument developed for the ESA Cluster satellite mission.

SCOPE will investigate fundamental physical processes that are key to understanding the functioning of the Earth's magnetosphere, as well as what drives solar flares, radio galaxy jets, supernovae remnants, and cosmic rays. The mission will put five formation flight spacecraft into the key regions of the magnetosphere.

"The science is the next step after the on-going Cluster mission and the upcoming NASA Magnetospheric Multi-scale mission (MMS) that UNH is also involved in. Whereas those two missions use four spacecraft to study the physical processes at one scale â a larger scale for Cluster and a very small scale for MMS â SCOPE will look at the cross-scale aspects of these processes." says Kistler of EOS and the department of physics.

The UNH SCOPE team has been given the go-ahead to conduct further work on the IMSA instrument. IMSA was only one of five selected by NASA from a field of 20 Mission of Opportunity proposals submitted to the agency, which will fund U.S. components for the Japanese satellite. The UNH team will receive $250,000 for the 11-month implementation concept study, after which NASA will determine whether the project goes forward.

For Solar Orbiter, UNH is a subcontractor to the Southwest Research Institute, the lead institution for the Heavy Ion Sensor (HIS). A team of national and international partners are also involved. UNH has already been awarded over $661,000 for the project.

October 26, 2011

Telegraph photo by Bob Hammerstrom - Some pipetting units from Integra.

N.H. firm makes high-tech versions of that laboratory staple: the pipette

If you've never used a pipette, you haven't worked in a laboratory, at least not a life-sciences lab. Moving tiny samples of liquid with back and forth between test tubes, petri dishes and other containers in order to see how the contents react or don't react, or grow or don't grow, or something-or-other, is the essense of a "wet lab". But you can't do it without those little tubes called pipettes.

Although I was never much of a "lab rat," it was still fun to visit Integra-Viaflo, a Hudson company that makes electronic pipette tools, operated by iPod-ish wheels, that can transfer up to 96 different samples at once. I really like the handheld model with 8 pipette tips - it looks like a high-tech comb for an Afro - which can adjust the spacing between the tips with a touch of the button.

Here's my story.

If you only go to one Halloween party, MakeItLabs might be the one to try

The wacky, geeky, do-it-yourselfy folks at MakeItLabs, the state's first "maker space" with tools and expertise for members to use, are holding a Halloween party on Saturday, and they're have a pumpking-carving on Thursday night.

The party sounds awesome, because if there's any place you're likely to see intriguing costumes, I would guess that MakeItLabs, which features both a hydraulic car lift and enough LEDs to light up City Hall, is the place.

As for the pumpkin carving, how about this descriptive line to whet the appetite: "Lasers and CNC machines may be involved."

The pumpking carving is open for all to see, as it will happen during their regular open house, starting at 6:30 Thursday. Directions are on their Web site. The Telegraph is sending a photographer.

I don't have a lot of costume imagination, but for the past few years I have enjoyed Halloween night because my wife and I give out candy in front of the town cemetery (the crypt is right behind us), via our "Haunted Hive." You have to reach inside the buzzing beehive - free downloadable bee sounds out of my iPod - to get your candy; my wife, hiding under the table, will grab your hand. We'd had some excellent screams from the 'tween female set.

Real geothermal energy in NH? Probably not

Map from SMU's Geothermal Laboratory showing underground temperatures available for geothermal energy. Green, in this case, isn't good.

Two years ago I wrote about an MIT study which reached the surprising conclusion that the Conway, N.H., area was a potential hot spot (so to speak) for future geothermal energy production, because of the heat released by natural radiation from underground granite. It was the only location east of the Mississippi on the list, and it was very borderline in terms of producing cost-effective energy. (We're talking real goethermal, as in hot water turning turbines, not "geo-heat-exchange" as the term usually means hereabouts.)

I never really believed it, and a new map coming out of research funded by Google, which likes geothermal a lot, supports that suspicion. The map from Southern Methodist University makes all of New Hampshire unhelpfully green - as in having too low a deep-underground temperature to be feasible.

Here's the SMU press release.

October 27, 2011

Searching Google with '+' doesn't work any more, in preparation for Google+

Wired is reporting that Google has quietly stopped allowing the use of the plus sign in search fields to force searches - to create an "and" search - presumably so as not to conflict with searches among Google+ its Facebook wannabe. From the story:

On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing "plus": the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator was part of Google since its launch in 1997 and built into every search engine since. Unlike their other recent closures, the removal of + was made without any public announcement. It could only be found by doing a search, which advised the user to double-quote the string from now on, making "searches" look like "awkward" "Zagat" "reviews." (Read the whole story, which has lots of detail, here.)

The fact that Google, which has always been incredibly open about everything, did this on the sly seems pretty darn corporate - maybe not evil, but not Googleish.

Fungus that causes 'white nose syndrome' in bats is identified; no easy solution

New Scientists is reporting that experiments have nailed down the species of fungus that is wiping out little brown bats through white nose syndrome, and confirmed that it passes via contact and not through the air.

Through complementary experiments in which the researchers housed 25 infected bats together with 18 healthy bats, they demonstrated that bats catch the syndrome from each other through physical contact. It cannot spread through the air: healthy bats did not pick up the infection when housed near to, but physically isolated from, diseased bats. The experiments confirm what many experts had suspected, and rule out the possibility that the fungus preys on sick animals but does not actually cause the disease. (Entire article is here. Nature paper that it reports about is here.

There's no easy solution; you can't spray fungicide in every cave in North America. Vaccinations are possible, says the article.

It's not clear what this will do to the debate over whether caves should be closed to humans, out of fear they spread the fungus on clothing or equipment. Many spelunkers have opposed this move.

SMU geothermal map

Geothermal energy near Conway, NH? Maybe it's not so far-fetched

Apparently I was too negative yesterday when I said that mapping of geothermal energy potential by Southern Methodist University cast doubt on earlier claims that the area around Conway, N.H., in the eastern portion of the White Mountains, had the best possiblity east of the Mississippi. I seem to have been looking at either an outdated map or one with insufficient detail, because the map I found with Google (which funded the work) shows Conway as a real hot spot - as you can see here.

I'll have to look into this a bit.

October 28, 2011

FCC says rural phone fees should now pay for rural broadband

The Federal Communications Commission has made a big change to the $4.5 billion Universal Service Fund, which was created decades ago using money from a fee attached to telephone bills. It was created to extend phone service to rural areas, where there wasn't enough business to cover the cost of lines, but now most of it will be used to do the same thing with rural broadband lines, not rural voice lines.

As Wired reports, this pits phone companies (which can use the fund) against cable companies like Comcast, which provide competitive phone service via Voice Over IP on their cable-modem systems. From the story:

Given that the FCC is shifting subsidies from traditional phone carriers to high-speed broadband providers, it asked for public comments about its authority to regulate Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol calls, such as Comcast's broadband-based phone service. That's because it's legally unclear whether the FCC has the authority to regulate VOIP calls. That puts into doubt a complicated system of FCC-required payments between phone carriers, who reimburse each other via "access charges" as calls move to and from one another's lines.

Read the whole thing here.

Telegraph photo by Bob Hammerstrom. Stephen Abodeely, right, and Mariah Shrey look on as her husband, Adam uses a laser to design a pumpkin at Make It Labs Thursday, October 27, 2011, in Nashua.

Carving pumpkins with a (what else?) laser cutter

If you're carving your jack-o-lantern with a knife, you obviously weren't at MakeItLabs last night - where, among other things, designs were carved with a laser cutter

'Incident at Exeter' UFO was lights from refueling tanker, say skeptics

The latest Skeptical Inquirer magazine has an article by longtime skeptical investigator Joe Nickell which says the famous "Incident at Exeter" UFO sighting in 1965, basis of a book of the same name that is one of the best-selling UFO-related books ever, can be explained by the operations of a KC-97 refueling tanker. The tankers were based at what was then Pease Air Force Base (it's now a civilan airfield) on the New Hampshire Seacoast, not far from where the myserious lights were spotted.

The key to the connection, the article says, is realizing that the tanker has five red "sequencing lights" under its better that fired in various orders in preparatio for the mid-air refueling with other jets. The Exeter UFO had similar lights.

The article's not online yet at the magazine site (here). They obviously want you to buy a copy instead of reading for free â¦ I sympathize!

October 29, 2011

Best NH-born chess player is in the pro US Chess League

Josh Friedel, from Goffstown, who is the first NH-native chess grandmaster, is now head of the Chicago Blaze in the professional U.S. Chess League. The Blaze are in the playoffs as the regular season ends.

It looks like the Union-Leader will have a story about him in the Sunday paper, judging from this teaser. It won't be online, though; you'll have to buy a copy to see it. As far as I can recall, it's the first time they've ever written about the Chess League â¦ perhaps they were prodded by my story earlier this year. Or perhaps not. I've certainly never had any luck getting Friedel to talk to me

October 31, 2011

Flywheel-electricity firm Beacon Power files for bankruptcy

UPDATE ON Nov. 1: CNet has a more extensive followup (read it here) with this alarming tidbit:

Earlier this month, two of Stephentown's 200-plus flywheels lost integrity> and melted into a "cotton candy-like material" hot enough to trigger an emergency water cooling system that, combined with the superheated materials inside, blew the tops off the half-buried, 3000-pound chambers, according to one local news report.

In the end, maybe spinning massive cylinders held in place with magnets in airless chambers at 16,000 RPM isn't the best way to store grid power. Still, flywheels hold theoretical advantages over batteries or fuel cells in that they have no chemicals that need to be replaced or kept out of the environment, and deliver efficiencies of 85 percent or more in terms of energy in versus energy out. And while flywheels can explode, so can batteries.

Original file, Oct. 31:

Beacon Power of Tyngsborough, Mass., makes of privy-sized flywheel systems used to stabilize voltage on the power grid, has filed for bankruptcy. It got $40-some-off million in federal alternative-energy grants and loans, so expect more hollering akin to what is happening with Solyndra.

Here's my quickie story.

Here's a CNet follow up, commenting about how alternative energy firms are having trouble crossing the "valley of death" that consumes many startups - going from post-R&D to self-sustaining commercial firm.

Photo by Rachel Andrews Damon, pilot Kenyon King - Granite Reliable Power windfarm being constructed near Dummer, N.H. Mount Washington is in the background.

A wind farm with Mount Washington in the background

The Telegraph got the above photo submitted in the mail, one of several aerial pictures of wind turbines being installed in and near the tiny town by Dummer, Mass. According to the photographers, that's Mount Washington in the background. The pictures was taken by Rachel Andrews Damon, being flown by pilot Kenyon King. The windfarm has the grandiose name Granite Reliable Power.

That's one of the great things about working for a newspaper; people spontaneously send you interesting stuff.

Photo by Kathy Cleveland This photo shows two cutoffs, or fuses that operate on high-voltage lines atop utility poles. The cutoff on the left is still intact, whereas the one on the right has been "blown" by a short circuit, cutting off power to some customers.

They've got big, honkin' fuses up there on utility poles

This photo shows two "cutoffs" on a utility pole near my house. They look sort of like a car's suspension system to me. The one one the left is fine; but the one on the right has had its fuse blown, so that it's hanging down like a flyrod or something. These blown fuses are the reason I didn't have power for two days (it just came back -woohoo!); when a tree hits the line and grounds it out, they blow. Much of what the local power company has been doing for days is driving around, finding blown cutoffs, getting tree companies to get the wood offf the line and then getting line teams to fix the fuse.

November 2011

The whole article is here

November 2, 2011

Warmth? Water? Light? Nah - in a power outage what's important is the Internet!

Great picture with The Telegraph's story today about people taking refuge from the widespread power outage at hotels, shops, etc. - it shows a bunch of people on the floor of Barnes & Noble, fixated on their laptops. Check it out here.* And a great quote:

Lowell, Mass., resident Robert Ellis made friends by bringing along a surge protector and letting other customers plug in some of their devices while he worked on his laptop.

"We just hang out with nice people who let you use their plugs," said Hollis resident Juli Jasinski, who had plugged her cellphone into Ellis' power strip. "You have to love New England. It's better than earthquakes."

*assuming you have power, of course

November 2, 2011

Back-of-the-envelope number of the day: A leafy oak can carry 3,000 pounds of snow

I have a story in today's Telegraph about the species of trees heavily damaged in the recent snowstorm, according to the county forester Jon Nute (who knows pretty much everything, in my estimation). One species hard hit was silver maple, which is no surprise - they're weak, fast-growing trees. The other, however, was oak - because they drop their leaves last, so they had maximum surface area to hold onto snow. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation (half-million leaves, one in 10 holds an ounce of snow) and came up with a whopping 3,000 pounds of snow that could be sitting up there. An entire elephant worth of snow! No wonder the trees broke.

Nute got it exactly right for me: I have oak and silver maple limbs all over the place.

Can you harvest the wind from bridge underpasses? UNH thinks maybe so

UNH is wondering whether it is possible "to use wind patterns from traffic and natural flow through bridge underpasses to harvest energy for powering lighting, signalization, emergency warnings and structural health monitoring systems." The EPA thinks this idea is interesting enough that it gave them $15,000 - hardly a vast sum, but it can't hurt - as part of its People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) grants.

Here's the EPA information about their proposal.

"Beacon Power: We're broke, but we're no Solyndra"

This is lazy journalism, but the CNet coverage of the Beacon Power bankruptcy is so good that I'm just going to link to it - again!- and even seat their headline.

The article talks about a response from the company president, saying that the firm hopes to use Chapter 11 restructuring to keep going. Here's the article.

November 3, 2011

Talk about angry birds: Burlington Airport fights a gull problem

The law of unintended consequences strikes again: Vermont shut down a huge commercial composting operation because it was polluting nearby waters, so St. Michael's College started up its own composting operation. But it has attracted gulls, who are endangering flights at nearby Burlington Airport.

The south Burlington city manager has suspended "the Firearms and Nuisance Ordinance, allowing airport officials to begin using pyrotechnic devices immediately," reports the Burlington Free-Press. I assume that means flash-bang devices to scare them, not shotguns to bring them down. Read the whole story here.

November 4, 2011

Not as many wireless-phone-only homes in N.H. as I expected

I'm doing a story about how wireless and cable modem communication fared in thestorm - the essence of the story is that nobody really knows because there's no regulatory oversight, like there is with electricity and landline phones; you have to depend on what the companies tell us.

During the reporting I stumbled across a study done by the Centers for Disease Control, of all people, about "wireless substitution" - an estimate of the percentage of adults living in households that have dropped landline entirely in favor of cells phones. New Hampshire is relatively low, at 16 percent - fifth-lowest in the country. Oddly, it estimated that Rhode Island had the lowest wireless-only percentage; I say oddly because it's a flat, urban area, which seems ideal for good cell phone coverage.

Here are some statistics:

State - estimated % of adults in wireless-only homes

N.H. - 16%

Mass. (Suffolk County, which is Boston) - 25%

Mass. (rest of state) - 15%

Vermont - 20%

Maine - 23%

Republicans (yes, Republicans) co-sponsor a conference about dangers of climate change

It seems that the issue of climate change has become so politicized that everybody assumes people worried about the reality of climate change can't possibly be Republican. How else to explain a brand-new group named (either apologetically or defiantly, I can't decide which) New Hampshire Republicans for Climate.

I just got press material from it about an upcoming conference on the effects of climate change that is headlined "Conservative Republicans Organizing NH Climate Conference." It goes out of its way to note that the group's chairman is a "life-long Republican" and that one speaker is a "former Republican congressman" who will discuss market-based approaches to tackling climate change.

It's kind of sad that such emphasis is necessary, but such is life.

The group is co-sponsoring with the New Hampshire Carbon Alliance (which, if stereotypes run true, has very few Republicans) a conference in Portsmouth on Nov. 17 called "Climate Change and New Hampshire's Seacoast." It will discuss how our scenic, albeit small*, coastline should prepare for rising ocean levels and more extreme weather. ~~More information about the conference is here~~.

Here's a better link for the conference.

NH Republicans for Climate chairman is named Farrell Seiler, and he's giving a talk titled "New Hampshire: Birthplace of the Modern Windfarm" which I assume will be about Crotched Mountain. I wrote about that long-gone site years ago - it was very cool. I'll have to hunt up my old story.

*At approximately 18 miles, it's the shortest ocean coastline of any coastal state â¦ unless you count tidal flats, which would bring the Great Bay into the equation and bump us up past Pennsylvania.

Ranked voting ("instant runoff") election coming for Portland's mayor

Next Tuesday is election day. Portland, Maine, is holding its first race for mayor - and it will use ranked-choice voting to find a winner among the 15 (good grief: 15!) candidates.

Ranked-choice ballots let voters rank the randidates, from first choice to last. If nobody gets a majority of 1st-place votes, then the mathematical equivalent of a runoff election occurs by analyzing the 2nd-through-15th-place tallies. This is sometimes called "instant runoff" for that reason. From the AP story:

The ballot is too complicated to be understood by the city's voting machines, so only first-place votes will be announced on the night of the election, said Caleb Kleppner, vice president of TrueBallot Inc. The final outcome of the race won't be known until the following day when the ballots are scanned and all of voters' rankings are extrapolated, Kleppner said.

Burlington, Vermont, had this system for three (I think) elections, but ditched it after the man who came in second in the tally of first-place votes was named mayor via subsequent calculations in 2009. The system is also used in Cambridge, Mass.

When I wrote about this issue 18 months ago, it produced quite a lot of discussion, as you can see here.

November 6, 2011

Seal deaths along New England coast lead to federal probe

The continuing deaths of seals along the New England coast has led to the NOAA to launch a probe. Here's the official statement, which includes this:

From Sept. 1 to Nov. 3, NOAA's national Marine Mammal Stranding Network, the New England Aquarium's Marine Mammal Rescue Program and the University of New England's Marine Animal Rescue Center, have been working with NOAA to respond to a reported 146 seals strandings in Maine, New Hampshire and northern Massachusetts. Most of the animals were harbor seals less than a year old. This is more than three times the average number of strandings that typically occur this time of year.

I spotted via the Union-Leader's daily mix of short links to other news sources, which they call headlines. Whoever compiles them does a good job of finding stories in weird places that are of interest to New Hampshire.

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this natural-color image on October 30, 2011.

What the Halloween snowstorm looked like from space

This picture from NASA says it all. Read more here.

November 7, 2011

Wind farm law in little Antrim generates big debate

It's a relatively minor state/city election day tomorrow. One of the more interesting votes will be in little Antrim, which is proposing some wind tower control ordinances that would either help or hinder development of big (more than 100 kw) wind towers, depending on who you talk to.

Here's the Keene Sentinel report.

Wind farm law in little Antrim generates big debate

Here's the Keene Sentinel report.

Smart meters are coming to New Hampshire, too (How'd I miss this?)

ADDENDUM: Check the discussion below my column (here) - it's pretty informative stuff, with just a soupcon of ranting.

It was pointed out by a reader responding to the article below (about Maine Central Power installing smart meters) that New Hampshire Electric Cooperative is also installing smart meters. It's a smaller utility and a slower schedule (set to be done in spring 2013), but it's mandatory - no opt-outs - and otherwise just as interesting. Here's the FAQ.

I'm embarrassed that I missed it. NHEC operates up in the central part of the state, mostly from Sunapee up to Plymouth, so it's way out of our circulation area â¦ not as far out as Maine, though.

November 8, 2011

Forensic study finds that "human" remains often aren't

Nice story in the NY Times (subscription probably required) today about how forensic study of grisly human remains often finds that they are actually animal bones. The story (here) is prompted by a story about a "little child's foot" that turned out to be a bear paw

About 20 percent of the cases that are vexing enough to involve a forensic anthropologist (in New York City) â typically cases involving skeletons or mummified or burnt remains â end up not involving human bones at all.

Dr. Adams often encourages detectives to e-mail him a cellphone photo of remains shortly after they are discovered to see if "I can make a spot call," he said. That way, he said, investigators do not waste time "securing a crime scene to safeguard a cow bone."

I've been trying to thin out our book collection in recent months, since it is overflowing the shelves and we don't have any obvious place to build new ones. One book I had forgotten about, handed down from a great-aunt's weird husband, was called "Bones for the Archaeologist". It's a primer for archaeologists (surprise!) who find bones amid their digs and want to figure out what species they belong to. Judging from the book, it's much harder than you would think, particularly since digs have to take into account extinct species.

Portland, Maine's ranked-choice ("instant runoff") mayoral ballot

Take a look at the ranked-choice ballot in Portland's 15-candidate mayor race!

I wouldn't want to be a poll worker in Portland, Maine, today, as voters face their first ranked-choice ballot, which asks them to rank their preferences for the 15 candidates for mayor. I expect much complaining.

One result of the format is that officials almost certainly won't know the winner tonight, unless the unlikely event happens and somebody gets 50.1% or more of first-place ballots. It's going to take them until at least Wednesday to go through the sorting process to figure out the winner. Heres the Press-Herald story.

Here is the city's explanation of the system (PDF).

Pictures like this are why people think the moon is a lot closer to the Earth than it really is. The moon is actually about 110 Earth moon diameters away.

The moon is farther away than you think (so the asteroid is less of a concern than you think)

Part of the reason some people are getting unreasonably worried by asteroid YU55 passing "between the moon and the Earth" is that they think the moon is closer than it really is. You can blame most illustrations (like the one attached) which are draw at misleading scale if they were done to real scale you wouldn't see diddly-squat.

The video linked below, spotted via Bad Astronomy, does a good job putting the distance in perspective. You should watch it, since it's entertaining, but for impatient folks here's the ending: If the Earth was the size of a basketball the moon would be the size of a tennis ball, and it would be 24 feet away. If a tennis ball was thrown 20 feet away from a basketball, would you think they were in danger of colliding? That's roughly what's happening with YU55.

Here's the video on Bad Astronomy.

Girl Scout "localvore" badge - not sure why they chose a radish (ugh)

Girl Scouts create a "localvore" badge

The name "localvore" has an annoying hipster/treehugger ring to it, but it focuses on a real trend: The increased interest in eating food that is grown relatively nearby, and grown by relatively small farms that you can get to know.

Five years ago I was writing about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operations as a novelty, but now they're mainstream, as are farmers markets featuring real food, not just knick-knacks and flowers, as well as pick-your-own places. Localvore-ism is truly becoming part of the mainstream - maybe not as mainstream as Cheetos and McDonald's, but no longer a weirdo fringe activity.

Here's a sign of its acceptance: The Girl Scouts have created a "localvore" badge, shown here. You get it through five steps:

1. Explore the benefits and challenges of going local

2. Find your local food sources

3. Cook a simple dish showcasing local ingredients

4. Make a recipe with local ingredients

5. Try a local cooking challenge

Very cool indeed. Here's a Boston.com story.

November 9, 2011

No easy winner in Portland's instant-runoff election, which enters the mathematical "instant runoff"

Portland's race for mayor using ranked-choice ballots did not produce a winner last night - that is, nobody was 1st choice for a majority of voters - so poll workers are going through the process of testing lower choices.

Brennan, a former state senator, earned 5,240 first-place votes, or 26.7 percent of the total on Tuesday. But Ethan Strimling, another former state senator, earned 4,390 first-place votes, or 22.4 percent, which left him "within striking distance," he said. The city will conduct an "instant runoff" election today using voters' second- and third-place choices â and possibly fourth, fifth and so on â until one candidate has more than 50 percent of the vote.

The Free-Press article (read it here) has a longer description of how it works. I can't find anything in their stories about how voting night went, so maybe it wasn't the long lines and confusion that I assumed it would be.

30-megawatt solar farm will be controlled by one PC, two guys

In the high desert of southern Colorado, a 30-megawatt, 200-acre solar farm is being built. (That is 10 to 15 times the photovoltaic output of every panel in New Hampshire.) The amazing thing, as CNet reports, is that it will be operated by two guys using one PC.

The $100 million plant comes with a heavy responsibility as only he and one technician will operate the plant from a small office a few hundreds yards from the panels. His main tool in monitoring the entire system is a computer back in the office hooked up to a network of sensors in the field.

That is amazing from a technical point of view, although it also shows how certain types of "green energy" aren't going to be major job-creators.