by David Brooks | Jan 2, 2020 | Blog, Newsletter
If you hate deceptive telemarketing and phone scams – a description that covers every human being who ever lived – as of Jan. 1 you can push back a little more. A new state law imposes civil penalties of up to $5,000 for calls that pretend to be coming from a...
by David Brooks | Dec 31, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
When it comes to storing lots of electricity for periods of time longer than batteries can handle, there are plenty of ideas being tossed around. Pump water uphill to a reservoir! Fill underground caverns with compressed air! Push a train up an incline! Stack a tower...
by David Brooks | Dec 27, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
Back in February I mentioned that LIDAR mapping of the White Mountains found that Mt. Tecumseh is only 3,995 feet tall, potentially removing it from the list of 4000-footers maintained by the Appalachian Mountain Club. The idea of the iconic list of peaks...
by David Brooks | Dec 27, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
There’s a couple of proposed bills in New Hampshire that would sharply limit phone and telecom companies from selling location data scarfed from the always-on corporate spy pretending to be a phone that we carry at all times. As NHPR notes (story is here)...
by David Brooks | Dec 26, 2019 | Blog, Newsletter
This is my site, so I get to choose the best Granite Geek posts/articles of 2019. Here they are, looking backwards through the year. (What about my favorite post of the decade? Many of the several thousand posts I’ve written over the past 10 years have...
by David Brooks | Dec 26, 2019 | Newsletter
All around the world there are programs to save samples, usually seeds, of many types of plants in hopes of preserving genetic diversity as human beings alter every aspect of the planet. One of these is starting up in Milton, N.H., but it doesn’t use seeds....