Getting broadband to rural areas remains a challenge
Tiny Chesterfield, N.H., as regular readers know, floated a loan so it could get fiber-to-the-home installed by Consolidated Communications, the local phone company. This isn't "municipal broadband: as the topic is often understood because the system is not open to...
read moreElectric planes are real, maybe coming to Cape Cod
Not long ago everybody was saying that electric aviation is unfeasible for anything more than the smallest private planes because of weight-to-power limitations of batteries and electric engines. Maybe not. Cape Air, an independent regional airline that flies to...
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Pollinator gardens are a hot topic
UNH research evaluating the relative attractiveness to pollinators of new varieties of old standards such as purple coneflower, Echinacea purpurea, a common garden perennial. Photo by Cathy Neal/UNH Pollinator gardens are a very hot topic - partly, I suspect, because...
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New Hampshire burns a lot more oil than you might think
Check the above graphic from the Energy Information Agency showing estimated total energy use in New Hampshire. You probably didn't think that almost two-thirds of our energy comes from burning oil, did you? That's because I, like most places, talk mostly about...
read moreSea level rise cost to NH: A billion bucks, more or less
A climate-action organization says it has crunched the numbers to estimate how much it would cost the U.S. to protect itself from "moderate" sea-level rise by 2040. Because we have a small coastline - about 18 miles, depending on how fractal you want to get - we have...
read moreNH will peer at tiny houses (and wake boats)
The legislature has passed and Gov. Sununu has signed into law a bill to study tiny houses, specifically "issues associated with state and local permitting of tiny houses suitable for year-round occupancy, including both tiny houses on permanent foundations and tiny...
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Eight years later, the Hooksett disks are still floating around the world
(I wrote most of this a year ago, but the state Department of Environmental Services tweeted about it this week as part of ocean environmental awareness, so let's remind ourselves of this fun story.) On March 6, 2011, more than 4 million plastic disks were...
read moreHashtag inventor is from New Hampshire
I've long been a fan of the Internet History Podcast which is, you'll be surprised to hear, a podcast about the history of the Internet. The most recent episode (listen here) has a long interview with Chris Messina, who was involved in lots of interesting things like...
read moreThis was a ‘meh’ year for NH maple syrup
Unseasonably cold weather this year hurt New Hampshire’s maple syrup industry, which produced about 148,000 gallons of syrup, the smallest amount of syrup in five years. The data reflect another fact which might surprise people here: New Hampshire is not a major...
read moreAre smartphones eating our brains? How would we know?
I'm old enough to have avoided smartphone addiction - my habits were set in stone before they were invented - but I've commented along with everybody else that these phones are altering homo sapiens before our very eyes, turning us into nearsighted,...
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Science Cafe NHAbout Granite Geek
Dave Brooks has written a science/tech column since 1991 – yes, that long – and has written this blog since 2006, keeping an eye on topics of geekish interest in and around New Hampshire, from software to sea level rise, population dynamics to printing (3-D, of course). He moderates monthly Science Cafe NH discussions, beer in hand, and discusses the geek world regularly on WKXL radio in Concord.
Brooks earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics but got lost on the way to the Ivory Tower and ended up in a newsroom. He has reported for newspapers from Tennessee to New England. Rummage through his bag of awards you’ll find oddities like three Best Blog prizes from the New Hampshire Press Association and a Writer of the Year award from the N.H. Farm and Forest Bureau, of all places. He joined the Concord Monitor in 2015.