Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
New England is no fan of electric heat
Many people in New England have long-term memories of electric heat being expensive thanks to our prices and, if you suffered through '80s-era heat pumps, ineffective. So it's no surprise to read from Axios that Northern New England has the lowest rate of home heat...
You think you’ve done puzzles during the pandemic?
f you are like me, you have wrestled with a lot of puzzles during these stay-at-home months. Jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, Sudokus, chess puzzles, retrograde chess puzzles (intriguing; check it out), even one those metal puzzles you try to take apart while...
AltaVista, the early search engine that might have saved DEC, was born a quarter-century ago
AltaVista was probably the best of the pre-Google search engines, created by Digital Equipment Corp. mostly to help them sell their DEC Alpha processor line. It was launched in January 1996, a cool quarter-century ago. Vice has a nice overview (read it here) of why it...
Concord hasn’t had a really cold year since Jimmy Carter was president
At Concord Municipal Airport, the official measuring station for New Hampshire according to the National Weather Service, 2020 was the fifth warmest year by average temperature in 130+ years. Perhaps a more significant point is that we haven't had a top-10 cold year...
Mass. to require all new cars to be electric by 2035
From the Boston Globe story: Massachusetts currently has about 30,000 electric vehicles on the roads, a number which may include hybrid vehicles, officials said. They set the goal of increasing that number to 750,000 by 2035, when all new “light-duty” vehicles, or...
Patents in N.H. through Jan. 3
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Dec. 27 to Jan. 3. *** RegDOX Solutions Assigned Patent for Secure Document Storage System RegDOX Solutions, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 10,880,309, initially...
Some quirky GraniteGeek moments from 2020
Looking through 2020's posts on GraniteGeek was an exercise in "COVID took over everything" but I managed a few otherwise-overlooked items that had nothing to do with viruses. Here are some that caught my eye: January: It's legal for state employees to modify the...
U.K. approves COVID vaccine being tested in N.H.
The BBC reports that the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine has been approved for use in the United Kingdom (which might not be all that united soon, but that's another story). A clinical trial for this vaccine is being run in New Hampshire. Among the testers is my wife;...
Sensors small enough to ride on a butterfly are changing wildlife biology
Sometimes science advances because of new ideas (this is where I make the obligatory Einstein reference) but sometimes it advances because of new tools. An excellent example of the latter was installed this year in Stoddard. “This opens up the ability to ask new...
What’s preventing a tiny house village from being built? Lots of things
The funky little town of Peterborough (which feels like a university town, but without the university - very odd) has an ongoing kerfuffle over a collection of tiny houses. Safety problems with electrical systems led the town to force people out the week before...
Return to the Concord Monitor