Let’s boldly go into the future – as in, the Atlantic Time Zone
Once again there are efforts in the legislature to get away from Daylight Saving Time by moving us into the Atlantic Time Zone and dumping the twice-a-year clock shift. A bill (HB567) would do it for New Hampshire as long as Massachusetts and Maine also do it....
read moreShould New Hampshire let an algorithm draw our political boundaries?
There's a bill before the state Legislature that would designate a "computer algorithm" to draw our political boundaries. It's similar to one introduce last year by the same legislator - I wrote about that effort one year ago. It went nowhere last year and probably...
read moreDartmouth will switch from oil-fired steam to wood-fired hot water for building heat
From Dartmouth News Service: Dartmouth is seeking proposals to build a biomass energy heating facility and transmission system to replace the existing central heating system. The new system, estimated to cost more than $200 million, will change how heat is produced...
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Calm down: There’s no real answer to ‘who got the most snow in this storm?’
I use a snowboard (not the Flying Tomato kind) and specialized meteorology ruler and frankly, it’s still pretty much an estimate.
read moreA two-sided solar panel is better than a one-sided one
They've rolled out a big solar canopy - solar panels over an outdoor parking lot - in Burlington, Vt., but what's interesting is that the 156 kW system has two-sided panels. (Here's an article describing that technology) From the press release: Encore Renewable Energy...
read moreWhich is safe enough: 1 ppm or 10 ppm? How do we know?
It sometimes seems that every chemical ever used in every product ever made turns out to be toxic, which we only realize after it has spread throughout the world and made people sick. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how toxic a chemical really is before we start using it?...
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Stone walls can be found via LIDAR from above, crowd-sourcing from below
A combination of the aerial mapping using a system called LIDAR plus Internet-based crowd-sourcing may finally answer one of the most fascinating, if not very pressing, questions about the New Hampshire countryside: How many miles of stone walls do we have? “We want...
read moreN.H. newspapers need Dan Brown to get mad at them on Twitter
Last week, Maine's best-known writer, Stephen King, got mad at the state's biggest newspaper through Twitter because it said it would stop buying freelance reviews of Maine-based books for its book page, instead relying on the national book reviews by AP that it...
read moreUNH moved up to top tier of research universities
From UNH News Service: The University of New Hampshire has risen to the top echelon of research universities in the country as designated by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and is now among the 130 doctoral-granting universities in the...
read moreDiscovery Center looks at the most distant flyby humans have ever achieved
If you want to learn more about that NASA exploration of the deepest deep-space object ever seen closeup, check the McAuliffe Shepard Discovery Center's show “To Pluto and Beyond - New Horizons Visits Ultima Thule”. The presentation will be Friday Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.,...
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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 New Hampshire Public Radio.
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.