by David Brooks | May 25, 2017 | Blog, Newsletter
Concord Steam, the company that has generated steam heat in the state’s capitol city for eight decades, shut down Wednesday at midnight due to financial and technical issues. I had a look back at its tumultuous history in the Sunday Monitor (you can read it...
by David Brooks | May 24, 2017 | Blog, Newsletter
From Dartmouth News Service: Over the past century, the Northeast has experienced an increase in the number of storms with extreme precipitation. A Dartmouth-led study finds that the increase in extreme Northeast storms occurred as an abrupt shift in 1996,...
by David Brooks | May 24, 2017 | Blog, Newsletter
“Maine’s Constitution calls for candidates to be selected by plurality, in which the candidate with the most votes wins, even if the vote total is less than a majority.” That sentence is at the heart of this Portland Press-Herald story, which details how...
by David Brooks | May 23, 2017 | Blog, Newsletter
I am a Baby Boomer, which means I grew up with the Chevy Vega and Chevy Chevette, two of the all-time worst cars ever made, and I sneered at all GM models as they nose-dived during the ’80s and ’90s. The idea that I’d ever be excited about a new car...
by David Brooks | May 23, 2017 | Blog, Newsletter
The Valley News has a nice profile of the new owner of a 1,35 megawatt hydropower dam in Claremont. Among other issues in resurrecting it was fixing gear boxes (“Gear boxes are notoriously finicky”) and getting permission from grid operator ISO-New England...
by David Brooks | May 22, 2017 | Blog, Newsletter
We’re all familiar with streets and roads, and turnpikes and highways – but are we ready for the “highly instrumented roadway”? We’d better be, because it’s coming to the F.E. Everett Turnpike. That’s the start of my story today in the Monitor, about a...