Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Two years and counting to the solar eclipse going through northern NH
It's a little less than two years now until a solar eclipse will zip across Coos County on April 8, 2024. The day will be an official non-holiday holiday. I've been writing about this since 2019 ("Time to Panic - it's only five years until New Hampshire's total...
Time to hit the hiking trails – those rocky, too-steep, overly popular hiking trails
I wrote a short story about repairs coming to the much-loved but much-overused Franconia Loop hiking trail - one of the greatest day hikes in the entire world. You can read it here, but the reason I bring this up is that it's an excuse to revisit one of my all-time...
N.H. patents through April 10
By Targeted News Service WASHINGTON, Jan. 23 – The following federal patents were assigned in New Hampshire from April 3 to April 10 . *** Antenum Assigned Patent for FM Scavenging for Wireless Charging Antenum, Merrimack, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent...
Algorithms textbook is a million-seller (and a Jeopardy! clue)
It’s a rare textbook that has sold over a million copies, has a Twitter account, has been a clue on Jeopardy!, and even made a cameo appearance in a popular Chinese soap opera. That distinction belongs to the best-selling Introduction to Algorithms,...
The tech woe of interoperability haunts wildlife-spotting efforts
A century ago, when the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count was just getting started, the idea of asking random people to provide field data about wildlife was ridiculous. These days it’s almost overwhelming. Organizations from most state wildlife agencies to the...
Old & new: Wood-burning stoves and heat pumps can work together
Embarrassingly for somebody who's an avid heat-pump fan, I heat my house with an oil-fired hot-air furnace. I also have a pellet stove in the living room, which I use as supplemental heat in winter evenings, when we tend to huddle in the living room anyway. This keeps...
Utility poles are boring, overlooked and incredibly valuable
I've long been fascinated by utility poles: They're so ubiquitous we don't notice them and yet they're amazing: 40-foot-tall straight trees are grown by the millions (there are somewhere around 500,000 utility poles in New Hampshire alone, and the North American Wood...
Too many bodies, not enough pathologists
The Monitor's Teddy Rosenbluth has a story about the state's chief medical examiner struggling with performing enough autopsies due to lack of pathologists amid the continuing fentanyl overdose surge. "The office has been trying to hire another full-time pathologist...
Our rooftop solar out-produced nuclear power for hours
A sunny, cool weekend in spring is prime solar-power-percentage time: Total usage is relatively low and solar panels are more efficient when it's cool. Still, it startled me to learn that for several hours of Saturday, April 2, in the six states of New England, the...
Portsmouth, NH, accepts cryptocurrency for payments
Portsmouth, by many counts the wealthiest city in the state, will accept various cryptocurrencies for payments of taxes and fees, although it has to be done through PayPal, Seacoast Online reports. Depending on your point of view, they are either leading the way into...
Return to the Concord Monitor