Wait – the first secure Internet retail sale took place in Nashua?!?
This is embarrassing! I just learned that a vital bit of Internet history happened in Nashua in 1994, when I was a reporter at the city's newspaper who was writing about the online world, yet I've never heard of it before. According to a 1994 article in the New York...
read moreHunting with ferrets, and roadable aircraft: Lawmakers get to work.
This is the time of year that legislators in the New Hampshire state government start the process of submitting bills. First the 400 representatives and 24 state senators draft a Legislative Service Request, which is basically a general idea for a law. It gets whipped...
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Playing in the dirt when it’s 140 million miles away
If Elon Musk ever makes it to Mars, he’ll grab his phone and start tweeting. Frances Rivera-Hernandez, on the other hand, would grab a shovel. “I want to dig some pits to see if the ground ice is there and how much,” said Rivera-Hernandez, a post-doc in Earth science...
read moreIs the Internet changing English?
Where do languages come from? Is the Internet changing English? Can I split infinitives? Why do some languages have masculine/feminine nouns but we don't? Why is “enough” spelled so weird? Come and ask your questions about the science linguistics – a topic we’ve never...
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New Hampshire is getting a mass-timber building
A few days ago I wrote about the way that engineered timber, a.k.a. mass timber, can replace steel and sometimes concrete in buildings, which creates big greenhouse-gas benefits. Here's the item, if you didn't see it. I mentioned that New Hampshire is behind our...
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“Clockwise” is losing meaning in a digital world
Steven Strogatz, a Cornell math professor and math communicator (I'm waiting for his much-praised book "Infinite Powers" about calculus to come out in paperback) had an interesting series of Tweets over the weekend that began: "I've long worried about this, and it is...
read moreTall buildings made with wood help loggers and the climate
Tackling the biggest problems of the world today and in the future could benefit from technologies of the past. “This is back to the future,” is how Joe Short, vice president of Northern Forest Center, put it at the start of a conference Friday discussing mass timber,...
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Maine would be great for a spaceport, Part II (with tech startup addition)
Last November I had an item about vague thoughts of creating an orbital small launching facility at closed air bases in northern Maine, using small rockets to launch cubesats. As I said at the time, "More like Wallops Island, Virginia, than Cape Canaveral." That idea...
read moreNew Hampshire patents
The Concord Monitor runs a list of patents that have been issued recently to companies or individuals in New Hampshire. Check it out.
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N.H. data-visualization geeks, celebrate
Do you like data? Do you like data about demographics and economics and other topics that shape how the world works? Of course you do, Granite Geek fan. So UNH Carsey School of Public Policy has a treat for you: They've taken "What is New Hampshire?", a chart-filled...
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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.